


Things Floating Like the First Hundred Flakes of Snow

by BeaArthurPendragon, krycekasks



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Peggy Carter, Blanket Permission, Bossy Bottom Steve Rogers, Bottom Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Complete, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Happy Ending, Healing Baths, Healing Sex, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magical Healing Cock, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Peggy Carter, POV Steve Rogers, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Steve Rogers, Recovery, Therapy, Top Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2020-12-13 17:55:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 51,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21001790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeaArthurPendragon/pseuds/BeaArthurPendragon, https://archiveofourown.org/users/krycekasks/pseuds/krycekasks
Summary: In the summer of 1968, the Winter Soldier manages to break free of his HYDRA programming enough to get a message to SHIELD Deputy Director Peggy Carter that Captain America is still alive.This is the story of how Bucky and Steve save each other (with a lot of help from their friends).Art by krycekasks.Fic complete.





	1. Old Ghosts and New

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2019 Captain America Big Bang.
> 
> Many thanks to Betheflame and Puchuupoet for their beta work, and I can't wait till y'all get to the chapters with Krycekasks' art. Much love also to the CapBB discord for their troubleshooting and cheerleading along the way. 
> 
> This story is divided into three parts, told from Peggy, Bucky, and Steve's POV respectively.
> 
> The title comes from Wallace Stevens' _[Man Carrying Thing](https://poets.org/poem/man-carrying-thing)_.__
> 
> Posting twice a week through Nov. 12.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This is a trap, of course,” Peggy said.
> 
> Chester nodded in agreement.
> 
> "I'm going anyway."

**PART 1: PRAGUE, CZECHOSLOVAK SOCIALIST REPUBLIC**  
**August 19, 1968  
** **(Peggy)**

It had begun last Friday, when Chester Phillips interrupted her morning intelligence briefing—as the director of SHIELD, he was the only person besides President Johnson who was allowed to—and without preamble went to her side and leaned down to whisper something into her ear.

“Meet me at the officer’s mess in five,” he said, and without waiting for her to respond, straightened up and left.

She’d turned the briefing over to her chief of staff and took the elevator aboveground, exiting the bunker casually, as though she were simply running an errand. Of course, nobody at SHIELD HQ would ever question the deputy director about where she was going, but old spy habits broke hard.

She could find her way around Camp Lehigh on muscle memory alone, as Chester well knew—which was good, because the place they were meeting was where the _old _officer’s mess had stood during the war. Now it was a helicopter landing pad, the center of which offered an excellent place to have a private conversation without being overheard in the middle of the day.

Chester was grimfaced as she approached.

“What’s wrong, Chaz?” she asked.

“I don’t know if _wrong_’s the right word for it,” he said. “But I just go an interesting phone call from SHIELD’s chief of station in West Berlin. Seems that about six hours ago, a young Army guard stationed at Checkpoint Charlie was handed a note from a man crossing back into the East who expressed an intention to defect. The note contained a Prague address and the word _Monday_ in English.”

“Why isn’t CIA handling this?” Peggy asked irritably. “Not that I wouldn’t love one more mission before you retire and chain me behind the director’s desk for good, but I haven’t been in the field since Madripoor.”

“Because there was one more thing written on the note,” Chester said. “_Send Steve Rogers_.”

Peggy swallowed hard, and to her shame, she felt her hands begin to shake. It had been years since she’d heard anyone say his name out loud, she realized, and the sound of it in her ear rang like the aftermath of a bomb.

“This is a trap, of course,” she said when she could speak again.

Chester nodded in agreement. The man had been _leaving_ the West when he approached the guard, which could only mean he wanted to draw Steve behind the Iron Curtain, and choosing Prague likely meant he was hoping to keep him there.

Because Czechoslovakia, flourishing under a recent spate of progressive reforms, was actually fairly easy for a Westerner to get into right now—but it was about to get very, very hard to leave. Soviet forces were already on their way to the Czech border to bring their unruly satellite back into line, and it was only a matter of days before any Westerner left in the city would find themselves caught there for a very, very long time.

“I know,” he said.

Peggy glanced back at Camp Lehigh, gave the subject approximately 15 seconds of thought, and then returned to meet his gaze. “I’m going anyway.”

Chester looked at her and gave that tight, wincing smile he always used when Steve was about to take the Howlies on what for anyone else would have been a suicide mission.

“I know that, too,” he said. He looked up into the sky and squinted, and as he did she heard helicopter rotors in the distance. “I already called you a ride.”

*****************************

She’d waited until the war was over to open Steve’s trunk.

It felt indecent, somehow, with the war still on, to stop and think her grief mattered. She sent the trunk to her family’s house in Hampstead and then joined the Howlies in the field for the remainder of the war, mopping up HYDRA bitter-enders and raiding labs and stealing as much intelligence and equipment as they could carry for the SSR to study. It was brutal, grinding, ceaseless work, and Peggy couldn’t have been more grateful for it, because it meant collapsing into her bedroll at night too sore and exhausted to dream of him.

And then winter gave way to spring, and Germany surrendered, and in June Peggy found herself back home for the first time in nearly five years on a month’s leave and no idea how to fill the days.

She slept through the first three and drank her way through the next four and every day she woke up to Steve’s trunk, standing accusingly in the corner of her bedroom, demanding to know how she could forget him so soon.

So that night, she took a pair of bolt cutters and a bottle of scotch up to her bedroom, locked the door, and faced the trunk. It was just an ordinary U.S. Army-issue footlocker, well-beaten and peeling, with tarnished rivets and cracked leather and Steve’s name stenciled faintly but distinctly across the lid, but Christ, it felt as lethal as an unpinned grenade.

She took a long pull of scotch to steady her hands—and her heart—and before she could talk herself out of it, snapped the padlock with the bolt cutters and opened the lid.

Her heart broke again over the ordinariness of what she found inside. On top, there was an Army-issue dopp kit and an Army-issue Bible and an Army-issue penknife. Below that, there was a neatly folded dress uniform and a neatly folded khaki sweater and a neatly folded t-shirts and neatly folded boxer shorts and neatly rolled socks and a neatly folded tie. She smelled each item of clothing as she lifted it out, eyes tearing up as she breathed in the familiar scent of bay rum and tobacco and Army-issue soap. And, though it was far too warm on the top floor in the summer, she pulled Steve’s sweater on over her nightgown, kissing the collar as it scraped across her lips.

Next, there was a packet of Peggy’s letters, and she cried a little more at that, for they had tried to write each other every week they were apart, even if they only had time to manage a few lines. Well, it wasn’t always writing—Steve preferred to fill the pages with doodles and drawings to show her what he was thinking about or what he’d seen, only resorting to words when reality was too awful to reproduce. He’d sent her drawings of Coney Island and Roman ruins and Belgian cathedrals and French children playing with bricks from destroyed villages. He sent her a sketch of a stray dog running away with Morita’s boot and a sketch of Jones and Dernier sewing up Farnsworth’s tent as a prank and a sketch of Dugan’s hat with a bullet hole alarmingly close to his scalp.

He’d illustrated her letters, too, she discovered—he’d lined the margins of most of them with tiny doodles of her, of Phillips, of Howard, of Phillips’ handsy secretary, the dreaded Lorraine. He drew the German bombers she described and the gadgets she told him Howard was cooking up and the cherry tree that stubbornly bloomed outside SSR headquarters every May.

There was also a packet of photos that included a portrait of Steve’s mother and a postcard featuring the New York skyline and a Stark Expo photobooth strip of Steve and Bucky vamping and being ridiculous. Bucky was in uniform and Steve had a split lip and the beginnings of a black eye, and Peggy realized that they’d must have taken the photos the night before Bucky shipped out—the night Dr. Erskine discovered Steve at the recruiting station.

Peggy smiled at the obvious fun they were having, but her eyes kept returning to one snapshot in particular. Bucky had one arm hooked over Steve’s shoulders and was kissing him on the cheek, while Steve was laughing, his eyes closed and his hands raised in mid-clap. The Steve she’d known was slow to laugh even on his best days, and the most anyone could ever coax from him was a wry chuckle.

It made her terribly sad to see, for it meant that the war had claimed his laugh long before it claimed his life.

She set the letters and the photos aside and turned her attention to the last item in Steve’s trunk: his diary. She wasn’t ready to read it yet—she wasn’t sure she ever would be—but she glanced through it just to see his familiar, tidy little script again.

As with his letters, the pages contained little writing, but they were full of drawings—sketches of Chester and Howard and all the Howlies, sketches of churches and villagers and a two-page skyline of the bombed-out London street around to corner from SSR’s barracks. There was a portrait of Peggy in the field, wearing her combat khakis and knitting a sock outside her tent, that brought tears to her eyes. Those socks weren’t with his things, which meant he’d been wearing them when he died.

It was so goddamned unfair.

She took another long drink from the bottle of scotch and idly ran her hand around the inside of the trunk, wishing there was more inside, wishing there was anything else at all she could have to remember him by.

That was when she noticed that the lining of the trunk’s floor was uneven in a much-too-even way. A cursory examination revealed a grimy strip of cellophane tape holding the top left corner of the lining down. She peeled it away to discover that the entire floor of the trunk was lined with notepaper—the torn-out pages of a second diary, she realized as she lifted one free.

And found herself staring at a portrait of Bucky, wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks, stretching lazily on a rock overlooking the sea. Peggy had never had much of an eye for art, but even she could tell that the lines of his drawings were as much a product of love as they were of skill.

“Oh, Steve,” she said softly to herself, her heart shattering as much for him as for herself. “How long were you hiding this?”

More scotch, and then she spread the drawings on the floor in a semicircle before her so she could see for herself where Steve’s heart had truly belonged.

There was Bucky, unshaven, clasping a tin cup of coffee before a fire in the forest. There was Bucky, shirtless as he cleaned his rifle outside his tent, and there was Bucky, handsome as a devil in his dress uniform with his cap tilted rakishly over one eye, leaning insouciantly against the bar at the Whip & Fiddle with a come-hither look that could not be imagined away.

None of the drawings were nudes, but for some it was a near thing. She couldn’t wrench her eyes away from one of Bucky leaning back on his cot on one elbow, smoking, with one knee up and the other leg dangling lazily off the side, and nothing but his dogtags around his neck and a scrap of blanket slung across his hips. Peggy could not help blush at the postcoital glow that practically radiated from the pencil lines.

Once her shock wore off, an unusual, difficult sadness set in. Everything made sense now, of course—Bucky’s perpetual devotion to Steve, Steve’s perpetual indecisiveness with her.

That strange, desperate night they spent together after Bucky died.

She’d chalked his awkwardness up to inexperience and grief, and maybe she hadn’t been entirely wrong about either, but it was clear now how much more complicated his feelings must have been.

He must have already decided that he wasn’t going to live long enough to keep the promise that came with his actions that night, she realized. He knew he could never give her what she deserved, but one night together before giving his life for his country? He must have decided to at least give her that.

“Oh, my darling,” she chided him softly. “You could never turn down the chance to be a martyr, could you.”

She knew she should burn the drawings—God forbid they fell into the wrong hands, and besides, they’d never been meant for her eyes, anyway—but she simply couldn’t bring herself to do it. So she’d tucked them away in her jewelry safe, along with his diary and photographs and their letters, and when she moved to America, she brought them with her.

No one knows about them—not Howard, not Chester, not even Daniel. To this day, it’s the only non-operational secret she’s ever kept from him.

She’d met Daniel when they worked together at the SSR’s field office in New York after the war. She supposed they’d initially gravitated to each other because they were both used to being underestimated—he’d walked with a cane ever since a bullet chewed through his femur during the battle of Bastogne—but that wasn’t why she liked him. He was a soft-spoken, intelligent man with a righteous heart, and an understatedly wicked sense of humor that reminded her a little—but only a little—of Steve’s.

They were both each other’s second loves—Daniel’s first sweetheart, Louise, had died in ’44 when a stray spark set off an explosion in the ammunition factory where she worked—and maybe that was why their relationship worked.

Peggy had tried to get him to stay on after SSR became SHIELD, but to her surprise, he’d said no. He said he wanted to be the one to decide when it was time to leave the field—not his leg—and besides, Howard had already invited him to put his mechanical engineering degree to better use at Stark Industries.

Today, he was the director of SI’s advanced prosthetics laboratory, and when Chester Phillips retired from SHIELD come December, Peggy would assume his place, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to run a federal security agency.

Not too shabby for a Bletchley Park girl, if she did say so herself.

They’re the parents of not one but two teenagers—Susan, 14, and Michael, 17. Susan’s an odd, delightful girl who’s skipped two grades in school and never met a machine she couldn’t fix, and Daniel’s already willing to bet that she’s going to give Howard Stark a run for his money one day. Michael, for his part, is a quiet, sensitive boy with the kind of artistic talent his teachers tell her only comes along once in a generation.

Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—Peggy’s allowed herself to think that Michael’s talent is Steve’s way of telling her that it was all right, that everything had turned out the way it was supposed to.

Up until three days ago, she even dared to believe it.

*****************************

The bar sits right on the bank of the Vltava River across from Prague’s Jewish Quarter. Behind her, the ancient castle looms above like a Gothic wraith, and the medieval town spills like a tumbled bucket of child’s blocks down the hill to the riverfront. Across the river, she can see the Rudolfinum, Prague’s opera house, lit up like a wedding cake while statues of famous composers line the parapets of the roof like sentinels of the human spirit. No matter how heavily the boot is crushed against a man’s neck, she’s found, he will always find a way to make art.

She presses the winding post of her watch—which is really a SHIELD tracking beacon—to activate the small microphone in her earring. The signal goes to a black Skoda parked around the corner, driven by a U.S. embassy secretary who does much more for her country than type.

“Lady Day to Birdland, over,” she says softly, covering the movement of her mouth by lighting a foul East German cigarette. When she hears the answering chirp, she adds, “I’m going in.”

But she pauses and smokes the cigarette halfway down before she enters, using the burn of the bitter, scraping smoke in her lungs to center her. It’s after 10 on a Monday night, and the place is active but not packed. It’s a sharp contrast to East Germany—the crowd is relaxed and cheerful, peppered with canoodling couples and pockets of animated conversation. She’s never seen anything like this behind the Iron Curtain before—the thick, surveilling fog of fear may not have lifted completely, but there was a new translucence she never would have thought possible.

She wonders if they know how close the Soviets are—if they know tonight’s probably one of their last nights of freedom. Maybe some suspect, maybe they don’t. Maybe tonight’s just a slow summer night out with good friends and cold drinks and an unexpectedly talented jazz trio playing forbidden American music like they’d been doing it all their lives. Maybe they’re just determined to enjoy it for as long as it lasts.

She scans the crowd for the man the guard had described. (“He looked like that Cuban fellow, ma’am,” he had stammered. “Castro?” Peggy had asked. “No, ma’am. The other one. The one that just died.”)

And indeed, there’s a Che Guevara lookalike of indeterminate age—long dark shaggy hair, scraggly two-week beard, black beret, even—sitting at the end of the bar with three empty stools between him and the next man. Despite the August heat, he’s wearing a brown leather motorcycle jacket and his left hand is tucked into his pocket—holding, Peggy has no doubt, a pistol. He rests a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray nearby and then takes a deceptively long drink of beer, though she can tell he’s swallowed only a tiny mouthful. She recognizes it immediately as an old spy trick, one she’s used herself many times before.

That’s her man.

Peggy pauses to consider her approach. At 47, she’s hardly honey-trap material, but she’s got no gray yet and she still has to pass SHIELD’s combat fitness test every year like every other agent—and besides, the bar is dark and she’s dressed youthfully in a modish dress. This could work.

She crosses to the bar and takes the seat next to him without asking if it’s free. She doesn’t even look at him but she manages to get a quick glimpse as she sits down, and she can tell as she does that he seems to be in good health, if exhausted—the shadows beneath his eyes are dark as bruises, and his jaw is rigid with tension. It’s been days since he’s seen a proper bed, Peggy thinks. Weeks.

She orders a glass of plum brandy in Russian and from the corner of her eye, she can see the man quirk a little smile.

“Your accent is still terrible,” he says softly. His Russian is perfect.

Peggy’s blood freezes at the word “still,” because it’s true—she’s better than she used to be but she’s never totally lost her British accent—and she covers her surprise by taking a long drag off her cigarette. She keeps her head forward as well, wishing this bar had a mirror behind it so she could look him in the eye, and responds just as quietly. “Excuse me?”

“In that little village outside Stalingrad,” the man says, and fuck discipline, she’s going to turn her head. There aren’t many people who know this story, and the ones who do are sworn to secrecy. “Kronas. They called you Queen Victoria.”

“Were you there?” Now that she’s looking at him, she can tell he’s barely in his early 30s, but he wouldn’t have been the first teenager she fought alongside. Some of the Russian partisans were barely 13. “Is that how you know Captain Rogers?”

“Yes, I was there,” he says. “But no, that’s not how I know him.” The man turns his face toward her, fixing her with an unexpectedly impish—and immediately familiar—look, and in perfect, Brooklyn-accented English asks, “You really don’t recognize me, Peg?”

And she can’t help it—she recoils back, nearly spilling her drink, because the man sitting next to her has the same blue eyes of a ghost who fell to his death 23 years before. A ghost who, if he had survived, should have turned 50 years old this past March.

“This is impossible,” she says softly, her eyes skittering hungrily over his face, considering and then immediately discarding the insane possibility that he’d fathered a son before he died and somehow relayed the entire story of his life to the kid’s mother.

“You fought the Red Skull alongside Captain America,” Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes says wearily. “And you think _this_ is impossible?”

“You bastard,” Peggy hisses, and he pales at the force of her anger. “He killed himself over you.” She throws a handful of _koruny_ on the bar and stands up. “Outside. Now. And for fuck’s sake, look happy about it.”

*****************************

There’s only a hairline moon tonight, and in the soft yellow glow of the sodium street lights, they could be just another couple leaving a bar. Bucky’s left hand is still in his pocket, and she reaches for the crook of his elbow—partly to sell the image of them as would-be lovers, but mostly to control the hand on the gun.

“Peg, wait—” Bucky says quickly, just as she registers the unnatural hardness of the arm. She skims his arm from shoulder to wrist, trying to understand what she feels, when Bucky simply takes his hand out of his pocket. He’s wearing a black leather glove that he peels off to reveal an articulated metal hand. The metal runs the entire length of his arm, if what she felt beneath his sleeve was any indication. She wonders how much of the rest of him is like this.

“Dear Lord,” Peggy breathes. “Are you a robot?”

“No,” Bucky says, replacing the glove. He nods toward the bridge up ahead that leads to the Jewish Quarter. “Too many ears on the street. Let’s talk up there.”

A police car rolls slowly down the cross street ahead, so she takes his left arm again, leaning into it like it’s soft warm flesh, like it’s capable of touching her with love, and turns a convincingly pretty smile toward him.

“What did you mean—he killed himself for me?” Bucky asks softly, even though the police can’t possibly hear them from this distance over the rattling Lada motor.

“Did you really have no idea how he felt about you?” Peggy snaps. “He couldn’t forgive himself for not saving you. He was so desperate to make your death matter that he didn’t think twice about sacrificing his own.”

“That’s not why he put that plane down,” Bucky says forcefully. “The nuclear drones on the Valkyrie could have taken out the entire Eastern Seaboard in under an hour.”

His words startle her out of her anger. It was common knowledge that Captain America had sacrificed himself to prevent the Red Skull’s top secret weapon from reaching the United States—but the exact nature of that weapon remained highly classified to this day. “How could you possibly know that?”

“They told me,” he says as they turn onto the bridge.

“Who are _they_?”

“The KGB,” he says simply.

Peggy swallows hard as a terrible realization dawns. There were stories of an American working for the KGB—unsubstantiated thus far, but increasingly credible. But Bucky? Surely that was impossible.

“And what are you to the KGB? A prisoner or an asset?”

“Until three days ago I was both,” he says. “Neither, now.”

“I hope you won’t be offended when I say I’m going to need quite a lot more proof of your sincerity than your word, Sergeant Barnes.”

He smiles. “I’d expect no less of you,” he says.

“What do—or did—you do for them?” Peggy asks. “I’m not stupid—I know this arm they gave you is a weapon.”

He gives a short nod. “I was an assassin,” he says bluntly, then pauses to light a cigarette. “Killing enemies of Soviet greatness.”

“Do they know you’re missing yet?”

“Probably,” he says. “I’ve gone dark for much longer than this, but my trip to West Berlin wasn’t authorized and they know all my aliases, so it’s best to assume they do, or will soon.”

“All right,” Peggy says, and it’s a relief, really. Hope’s an expensive emotion for a spy; at least now she knows to save her brass for the fight to come. “Who do they typically send when one of your lot takes an unsanctioned vacation? Local police? Tac team? Assassin?”

“All of the above, I imagine,” he says. “There’s no ‘my lot,’ Peg. Just me. I’m the only one of my kind to survive.”

“Survive Zola’s experiments, you mean. Is that how you survived the fall, too?”

“Yes,” he says. “The Red Army found my body flash-frozen in a snowbank when they reached the Danube the next day. They recognized me from the newsreels, so they flew me to a KGB science lab in Siberia. They had captured a number of HYDRA scientists during their advance into Germany, and they’d been working on a new technique to resuscitate victims of a flash-freeze. They’d been testing on prisoners from a nearby gulag, with little success, but since I had the benefit of Zola’s serum, they decided to test the procedure out on me,” he says. “If it didn’t work, Stalin was going to curry favor with Roosevelt by personally returning my corpse to the Americans at Yalta with his sincerest sympathies. If it did work, though—they might have lost Zola to the Americans, but they weren’t about to lose his creation to them, too.” He shrugs. “It worked.”

His voice is flat, businesslike. These aren’t memories, she realizes—just facts from his file. Twenty-three years too late, he’s simply filing his after-action report.

“Evidently,” Peggy says. It checks out: The reanimation protocol had been part of a tranche of intelligence hand-delivered to U.S. embassy in Budapest by a Soviet defector last year. But so far he hasn’t told her anything she doesn’t already know.

They’ve reached the middle of the bridge, and they stop, leaning on the wall as if to enjoy the reflection of the city lights sparkling in the water below. Bucky only looks for a minute, though, before turning around and leaning his back against the wall instead so he can keep an eye out for anyone who might be approaching.

“Is the serum the reason you’ve hardly aged, either?”

“No,” he says. “Well, yes, I age more slowly, but the reason I’m still this young is because the KGB kept me suspended in a cryogenic chamber when they didn’t need me for long periods of time. They wanted to maximize their investment, you see—make sure I lasted as long as I could. Hurts like a bitch, but what other 50-year-old can say he’s this pretty?”

Peggy swallows hard, and for the first time, she begins to allow herself to believe he’s telling her the truth.

“Why did you never try to escape?”

Bucky winces and shakes his head. He levers up from the wall and paces a little, taking deep drags off his cigarette, not quite looking at her. “You’ve got former HYDRA scientists on staff. They ever teach you their indoctrination protocol?”

“No,” Peggy says sharply. “We would never do that.”

Bucky gives a soft bitter laugh. “Of course you wouldn’t.”

“Bucky, what did they do to you?” Peggy says.

“Take your wildest guess and make it ten times worse, and you might get close,” he says grimly. He glances up the bridge at an approaching couple. “Come on,” he says. “We should keep moving.”

Peggy threads her arm through his again and they continue down the bridge toward the Jewish Quarter. They feign love and use their laughter and little glances as an excuse to check out the couple passing in the opposite direction. It’s just a skinny teenage soldier and his skinny blonde girlfriend burrowing her face into the curve of the boy’s neck like a vampire searching for an artery, and they both seem too drunk and far too young to work for any intelligence service.

“Is that girl yours?” he murmurs softly, nuzzling her neck.

“No,” she murmurs back. “Yours?”

“Pretty sure she’s _someone’s_,” Bucky says, picking up the pace.

“What about you?” she asks bluntly. “Who are you really working for?”

“You think this is a trap.”

“You were already safe in West Berlin, yet you wanted to meet in Prague. And we both know the Soviet army is less than 12 hours away from occupying the cobblestones beneath our feet,” she says crisply. “Darling, I _know_ it’s a trap.”

Bucky snorts. “Now that’s the girl I remember,” he says. “Right to the point.”

“Answer the question, Bucky. How did you break free?”

“The short version is that their brainwashing wasn’t as thorough as they thought it was. The long version—we don’t have time for right now,” he says. “Like you said, the Soviets are less than 12 hours away, and there’s something here we have to steal before we leave.”

“And what’s that?”

“The coordinates of the Valkyrie,” he says. He turns to face her and lifts her chin with his finger, and for a moment she thinks he’s about to kiss her. “The Soviets want to do to Steve what they did to me. And I’m not going to let them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Bucky and Peggy go on one last mission together.


	2. It Always Ends in a Fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Our mission is to save Steve, not me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Featuring art by krycekasks!

The last time she saw Bucky was in January of 1945, just after the Kronas mission and two weeks before he and Steve died within days of each other. The Howlies had been in the field nonstop since D-Day, and Phillips had ordered them back to London for a week’s R&R to eat, sleep, and defrost.

Mostly, though, they drank—even Steve, even though the Howlies considered it a waste of good whiskey. The old pub near SSR’s HQ—the Whip & Fiddle—had been half-flattened by a Baedecker bomb late in the war, but the piano was still there and so was most of the roof, and the owner was happy to sell whatever liquor and beer he could rustle up on the black market to anyone willing to brave the cold and damp to huddle up near the fire with a pint.

Once he was sufficiently warmed up, Falsworth commandeered the ivories and the rest of the Howlies took turns dancing with some of the SSR girls while Peggy kept Steve company in the corner.

Everyone had accepted long ago that Peggy was Steve’s gal. Whenever they were at HQ together, they shared their meals; whenever they were in the field together they shared their watches. When they weren’t together—which was most of the time—they wrote each other weekly. When Steve came back to HQ, she was the first person he sought out; when someone made a joke, hers was the first smile he looked for. Sometimes he would even place a hand on the small of her back to usher her through a door or a crowd, or offer his arm on the rare afternoons where they had an hour at liberty to stroll through London so she could show him the sights.

But that was it. There was no question that Steve liked her enormously, but there had never been a kiss or an embrace or anything at all that could be mistaken for anything more than a dear friendship if you squinted hard enough. Peggy normally wasn’t shy about asking for what she wanted, but she couldn’t bear the thought of embarrassing him and pushing him away.

The naked fact was that she needed him in her life any way she could get him—needed his gentle bravery, his wry, quiet sense of humor, his unshakable faith that man was inherently good and that evil could always be conquered. This war had demanded compromises she’d never believed she would ever consider making, and Steve had become her North Star through all of it. She was not about to risk losing that.

Or losing this: Squeezing themselves into a busted banquette near the fire with the stuffing half-eaten by rats in a bombed-out pub in the middle of London, warming themselves with a bottle of Talisker that Chester had liberated from the American officers’ mess the week before and taking deep, existential comfort in watching men who had been to hell and back more times than they could count still able to find joy in the world.

Mostly, Bucky. Neither one of them could keep their eyes off him. He was dancing with Phillips’ secretary, Lorraine, deftly guiding and twirling her around the rubble without so much as breaking a step. He’d always been quick and athletic—all the more so after Zola injected him with that serum—but it was only now that she realized how graceful he’d become, too.

“Wouldn’t it be poetic if instead of making him a supersoldier, HYDRA merely turned him into the next Fred Astaire?” Peggy asked. “Look at him.”

“He got a lot of practice before the war,” Steve said, knocking back the last of his scotch. Monty began to play a slow Billie Holliday tune, and Steve waved Bucky over. “Buck!” he called. “Show Peg what you can do.”

“And abandon you to Lorraine?” Peggy murmured. “I should think not.”

“I fight Nazis, Peg,” Steve said wryly. “I think I can handle Lorraine.” He grinned and gently pushed against her back. “Go, have fun, would you?”

“You fight Nazis, but you’re too afraid to learn a waltz,” Peggy said tartly, but she stood anyway because there were few pleasures in life as pure as dancing with a man who knew how, and besides, she was wearing her red dress again, and she quite liked the idea of making Steve a little bit jealous.

And she liked Bucky well enough. More than she liked to admit, honestly. He was cocky and cavalier and took too many risks, but he had a good heart and his devotion to Steve was impossible to argue. To Bucky, there was always going to be some part of Steve that stumbled and gasped for breath, some part of him only Bucky could protect, no matter how strong and tall he grew, and Bucky wore that responsibility like a second skin. Peggy admired that in him, no matter how many times she wanted to slap him for his arrogance.

“_Lef_-tenant Carter,” Bucky said in a terrible approximation of Monty’s plummy public-school accent, bowing with a flourish.

And Peggy had not wanted to be charmed, but she was, and she’d laughed and blushed like a girl to boot. But then, she’d had her fair share of scotch that night, too.

“Sergeant Barnes,” she’d replied with a sly smile, offering her hand to him.

He took it and drew her in close to him—not hard, but with an unexpectedly delicious sense of authority that made her want to give herself over to him completely. It was an unusual feeling for a woman who preferred to be in charge, and she discovered she quite liked it.

She rested her left arm around his shoulders as he placed his hand on her back, fingers spread wide, holding her firmly against his hip, so close that her breasts brushed across his chest, her nipples hardening a little against the stiff cups of her brassiere. “Relax,” he’d whispered as they found their fit, his breath ghosting across the side of her neck. “I’ll take good care of you.”

“Oh, you will, will you?” Peggy murmured, her voice lower than she intended it to be, and Bucky grinned wide and swept her out onto the ruined dance floor.

She hadn’t danced since before the war—since before she went to America to consult with the SSR, for that matter—much less had a proper snog, and finding herself this close to Bucky made her realize just how starved for a man’s touch she was. And Bucky was—well, he was devastatingly handsome. He knew it, more’s the pity, but tonight it felt less like vanity and more like charisma, and dear lord, had she _actually_ simpered?

She didn’t want to, didn’t want to betray whatever it was she had with Steve—what _did _they have, exactly?—but oh, had she missed this. Missed being touched, being held, being regarded as a thing of exquisite beauty.

Under any other circumstances she would have been well pleased to follow the evening through to what she imagined would be its inevitable conclusion. But under the present circumstances she simply found herself growing more and more angry that the man she was dancing with—that the man making her feel this way—wasn’t Steve.

“Why doesn’t Steve ever want to dance?” she asked suddenly. It came out sounding petulant and needy and she hated herself for it, but she needed to know all the same.

“Aw, Peg, go easy on him,” Bucky said gently. “He never had much experience with girls. He’s shy about it.”

“Surely he knows me well enough to know I don’t give a damn about any of that.”

“I know,” Bucky said, squeezing her hand. “Look, anyone with eyes can see how fond he is of you. He’ll come around to the rest when he’s ready.”

“Will he?” she’d asked. “Ever be ready, I mean.”

Bucky had winced at that, eyes flicking up toward the shattered roof as though he were making a hard decision. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told him to make a move before someone else turns your head,” he said, finally coming around to the truth of the thing, the confidence he was betraying by telling her this. “He doesn’t think he’s got anything to offer you besides a famous name.”

“That’s absurd.”

“I know that, but I’m not sure he does.” Bucky maneuvered her neatly around a small pile of bricks and gave her a little turn. “It’s only a matter of time now, though. The Nazis are on the run. If I was a betting man, I’d say you’ll get your dance by spring.”

He met her eyes then and offered a warm, genuine, sympathetic smile that helped loosen the knot behind her lungs better than any words could have.

“You can be frightfully kind sometimes, you know,” Peggy said.

“Just don’t tell the boys, okay?” Bucky said, and winked. “Wouldn’t want to ruin my reputation.”

Then he’d spun her around into an overly dramatic dip that made them both laugh, and when Bucky brought her back up she could see Steve over his shoulder.

It was, she later realized, the last time she ever saw Steve smile.

*****************************

“Last week, a Russian spy plane spotted a strange shadow beneath the ice off the coast of Greenland,” Bucky says over his shoulder. They’re heading deep into the Jewish Quarter now, staying off the main streets, just as they did in February of ’44, by threading through narrow, twisting cobblestone alleys so narrow they could touch the walls of the buildings on both sides by simply lifting their arms.

“At first the analysts thought it was just debris from a glacier that had calved recently, releasing a lot of sediment into the Arctic Ocean. But on closer inspection, they realized the lines were too straight,” he says. “There’s a KGB asset in Iceland who runs a long-haul air freight service, and five days ago, they dispatched him over the area to get a closer look. A storm was moving in, but before he had to bug out, he was able to tell it was an airplane wing.”

He glances back at her. “A very _distinctive_ airplane wing.”

“That’s quite a story,” she says mildly, a hint of sandpaper on the edge of her voice the only indication of the hope she’s trying not to allow herself to feel. “How’d you come by it?”

“I was sent to kill the pilot and steal the flight data recorder,” he says. “Before he died, he asked if it was because he’d found the Valkyrie.”

Peggy shivers. “What’s the Soviets’ plan?”

“The Valkyrie is about half a mile inside Greenland’s territorial waters, which means we can’t raise it outright,” he explains. “We’re training a team of arctic salvage divers in Murmansk right now, and in a couple of days, they’re going to board a submarine that’s going to park exactly 12 miles and one inch off the coast of Greenland. The divers will use underwater propulsion devices to minimize their exposure to the freezing water, gain entry to the Valkyrie any way they can, recover Steve’s body and any other technology or records that might be salvageable, and return to the submarine in less than one hour. The submarine will then return to its base in Archangelsk. Steve will be flown to a KGB research facility in Siberia and the divers and the submarine crew will be shot. There will be no record of the mission, official or otherwise.”

“How civilized.”

“Don’t pretend your side’s better, Peg,” Bucky says over his shoulder, directing her down a new alley running behind a line of shops. There’s more space here, allowing them to walk side by side for a while.

“We’re a little better.”

“Tell me, how’s your little adventure in Vietnam going?” he says. “How many men have you sent to die for no other reason than to project American greatness onto the world? And how many more will you sacrifice until you have no choice but to admit the war’s been lost for years? Sometimes your side’s capacity for self-delusion puts the Soviet Central Committee to shame.”

“You were on our side once, too, Bucky,” Peggy says sharply.

“No, Peg. We were both once on _Steve_’s side.” He shakes his head and spits on the pavement in disgust. “I’m not sure either of us are, anymore.”

“Oh, sod off,” Peggy says irritably. “We both know whose side he’d rather wake up on. It’s the whole reason you lured me here.”

“Well then, we’d better make sure you get to him first,” Bucky says.

He pulls her out of the alley into a narrow passage leading to the sidewalk. The business to their left is a fruit market; the passage is stacked high with discarded vegetable and fruit crates. Bucky lifts an overturned cucumber crate and withdraws a dark duffel bag.

“You’re armed, right?” he asks, kneeling by the bag to unzip it.

“Of course.” She hikes up her skirt without embarrassment and takes a snub-nosed Colt .38 out of her thigh holster. She’d just as soon carry a shoulder holster and wear trousers like the men, but when a girl’s undercover, needs must.

“When’s the last time you were in the field?” He shrugs off his jacket so he can don his shoulder holster. He’s just wearing a t-shirt beneath, and Peggy blinks quickly at the sight of his arm on full display.

“They clearly weren’t worried about you blending in,” she says.

“They didn’t exactly ask me what color I wanted,” he says gruffly, slotting his guns into the holster and strapping an ammo belt around his waist.

“I’m sorry,” Peggy says softly. “I shouldn’t have made fun.”

He waves her apology away impatiently. “When’s the last time you shot anyone?” he asks.

“1963. But it’s hardly the kind of thing you forget,” she says. God knows she still dreams about them all. “Besides, I’m at the range once a week, just like every other SHIELD officer.”

“This isn’t a firing range.”

“You’ve never been to one of SHIELD’s ranges,” she says tartly.

He rocks back on his heels and grins. “Since time is short, this is going to be a smash and grab,” he says. “These aren’t the only copy of the coordinates, of course. Moscow Center has them, and so do KGB officials in Murmansk and Archangelsk. And,” he says, tossing a grenade in the air like a baseball and catching it before shoving it into his pocket, “so does HYDRA.”

“HYDRA? But—"

“America might have gotten Zola, but the USSR scooped up most of his deputies,” Bucky explains, standing and brushing off his trousers. “The KGB reestablished HYDRA under their leadership as its experimental science division. But unlike the rest of the Soviet government, HYDRA is decentralized by design, with key facilities and resources housed in Soviet satellites around the world. Its agricultural research center is disguised as a coffee plantation in Ethiopia, for example, while its computer science division is housed beneath a coal plant in North Korea. Their biological weapons laboratory located in a bunker deep in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan,” he says cocking his head to their right, “and their central data storage facility is located here, in the basement of a grocery store in Prague.”

She glances up the walls lining the passageway quickly, immediately clocking the security camera mounted on the roof gutter. “So they know we’re here.”

“Not yet. We’re in a blind spot. I wouldn’t step any further to your left, though.”

“You might have mentioned that sooner.”

“You might have looked up sooner,” Bucky says bluntly. “Getting a little rusty behind a desk, Peg?”

“What do you know about me, anyway?”

“Enough to know a happily married mother of two is willing to risk everything to save her old flame,” Bucky says, screwing a silencer to the barrel of one of the two guns he’s holstered beneath his jacket. “This time of night, there are six guards and two technicians on staff. I have the access code to the door, but once we’re inside, the gig is going to be up. You just stay behind me and let me do the shooting, and only use your gun as a last resort, okay?”

“Bucky, I can—”

“I know you can help, but I need you to save your ammunition,” Bucky interrupts. “There’s only one way in or out. The minute the first guard sees us, they’ll sound the alarm and we’ll have less than 15 minutes to find the data cassette and get out before Czech state security descends on us like hellfire. And if that happens, the only way—_the only way_—that tape gets to SHIELD is if you shoot your way out the way we came.”

“And you?” Peggy asks.

“If that happens, I’m already dead,” Bucky says. “Our mission is to save Steve, not me.”

“Bucky, I haven’t come all this way just to leave you—”

“This isn’t a negotiation, Peg,” Bucky says sharply. “If we get into trouble, you take the tapes and run, do you hear me?”

Peggy swallows hard. “Very well. Tell me what I’m looking for.”

*****************************

As a getaway vehicle, you can’t do much worse on this Earth than a 1957 Trabant—it has only slightly more horsepower than a garden tractor and its engine is only slightly quieter. But it was nearby, it was unlocked, and it had two spare cans of fuel in the boot. It would have to do.

She’s grateful for the noise and vibration of the engine, to be honest—it helped drown out the hammering of her heart, the formless scream that seemed to fill her brain. She had seen no end of terrible things during the war and after—witnessed firsthand how meticulously and brutally a man could be taken apart, body and soul, and transformed into a nightmare. And yet seeing what Bucky had become had filled her with an icy horror she’d never felt before.

*****************************

The moment they’d breached the door to the storage facility, any remaining trace of the Bucky Barnes she’d once known evaporated. He’d never been one to hesitate in a battle, even before, but the calm, predatory ruthlessness with which he leveled his gun and advanced steadily on the guards as he fired was frankly shocking. There was no cruelty to it, no shift in his breath—he didn’t even so much as blink when he fired. (Everyone blinks when they shoot, even with silencers. It’s an involuntary neurological response to the shockwave created by the bullet. Overcoming that reflex is as impossible as controlling your heartbeat. And yet.)

Peggy had followed him closely, one hand clapped hard against his shoulder and the other on her gun, and she was able to feel his wolflike strength and grace flow through her like an electrical current. Felt the servos in his arm shift the gun’s aim from the guard emerging from the toilet still wiping his hands on his trousers to the one fiddling with the radio in the corner to a young female technician methodically sorting and boxing tape cassettes at a metal table next to the mainframe, a bright bloom of blood spreading rapidly across her white-coated back as she fell. The older technician died bringing a cup of coffee to his mouth; the fifth guard met his doom with his gun just half-raised, Bucky’s bullet tearing the shout from his throat.

She’d felt something like it once before, that night they’d danced at the Whip and Fiddle, but all the warmth had long since bled off, leaving nothing but cold efficiency behind. Bucky Barnes had infuriated her more times than she could count, but he had never once frightened her.

In that moment, Bucky Barnes scared the hell out of her.

She’d gotten it all wrong, Peggy realized as Bucky sliced the carotid artery of the final guard with a perfectly aimed knife—the weapon HYDRA had created wasn’t his arm. It was Bucky himself.

The only thing that kept her from giving herself over entirely to the horror of it was the need to get her hands on that data cassette. The need to keep HYDRA from mutilating Steve the way they’d done him.

In less than two minutes, the entire night shift complement lay dead on cracked tile floor, their blood seeping in fine runnels along the grout. For a brief moment the room was silent but for the buzz of the fluorescent lights above and the whooshing hum of the large mainframe computer mounted into the wall, lights winking on and off like Christmas tree lights across its vast display. What Peggy wouldn’t have given for 24 hours to ransack every last byte on that machine.

It took a moment for Peggy to let go of him, to shake off the fear that as soon as she crossed his path of vision, he would kill her too, but time was too short to be afraid. “Right,” Peggy said, squaring her shoulders and crossing the room to the tall metal shelves stacked high with celluloid data cassette boxes as though she had not just watched her long-lost mate murder eight people, including two unarmed civilians, before her eyes. “Let’s find this tape.”

“Wait,” Bucky said, tearing down a framed poster celebrating Soviet technological superiority with an unconcerned crash to reveal large metal wall safe. He reached up with his metal hand, dug his fingers into the cinderblock around the casing and—just pried the door off to reveal at least two dozen data cassettes stacked within.

Peggy spotted a box of heavy paper burn bags next to a filing cabinet and frisbeed one over to him. “Take them all,” she said. “We’ll sort them out later, and besides, it’ll be harder for them to figure out what we came for.”

“And if SHIELD gets some additional intel in the bargain, all the better?” Bucky asked, sweeping the tapes into the bag.

“Yes, Bucky,” Peggy said evenly, taking the bag from him. “All the better. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

Bucky quickly reloaded his gun as they hurried back toward the door, trying to avoid tracking through the blood lest their shoeprints give them away. Not that it would matter much; Bucky was already digging one of the grenades out of his pocket to erase their tracks when the door slams and—impossibly—the skinny drunk blonde they passed on the bridge storms through, gun drawn.

“Winter Soldier,” she says sweetly in Russian. “Out past curfew with foreign girls, I see.”

Bucky gives a gruff, indistinct swear in Russian and raises his gun. Then softly, in English, to Peggy: “I’ll take care of her. You just run, okay?”

“No,” the Russian woman said, in English, drawing a second gun and pointing it to Peggy. “You’ll stay.”

“Friend of yours?” Peggy asked.

“Not exactly,” Bucky said, not lowering his gun.

“She must need us alive or she’d have killed us by now,” Peggy observed mildly. “I think the KGB mean to interrogate us.”

“Pretty sure they mean to do much worse than that,” Bucky said darkly.

The Russian woman smiled. “They’re going to make you go on Soviet state television and tell the world you’ve defected.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Oh, I can show you how we make people do things, my dear,” she said, turning to Bucky and switching back to Russian: “_Longing_.”

“Please don’t,” Bucky said harshly. “Please don’t do this.”

The woman laughed bitterly. “_Rusted_.”

“No!” Bucky cried, dropping his gun to cover his ears. “Stop!”

“_Furnace_.”

“Peggy, run!” Bucky dropped to his knees and tried to jam his hands even harder over his ears. “You can’t save me.”

“The hell I can’t.”

“I’ll kill you, Peg. Run!”

Peggy threw the bag of data tapes at the woman with a clattering thud. It provided just enough distraction for Peggy to draw her gun and point it at her.

They both fired at the same time.

The Russian woman struck Peggy’s arm. Peggy struck the other woman’s chest. Bucky remained fetal on the floor.

“I’ve heard enough out of you, missy,” she spat, moving toward the fallen body and punching one more bullet into her brain to make sure she was dead, only vaguely aware of the bloody tear her bullet had put through her left triceps. “Get that,” she said over her shoulder to Bucky, waving at the bag of tapes, and that seemed to startle him into action. “Let’s go.”

Before they pulled the vault door closed, Bucky rolled two unpinned grenades deep into the lab; one at the mainframe and the other at the shelves full of cassettes. They weren’t the only copies of the data, of course, but it felt good to burn them nonetheless.

When they got back to the alley, Peggy leaned over and vomited as she felt the grenades tear through the cellar below with a muted rumble.

“Here,” Bucky said, lighting a cigarette and shoving it into her hand. “It’ll settle your stomach.”

Peggy accepted the cigarette, took a deep drag, and leaned heavily against the wall. Her arm was bleeding heavily now—the bullet must have severed her cephalic vein, she thought somewhat dizzily. She held the cigarette between her teeth, smoking hard to keep the bees threatening the edges of her vision from encroaching any further, shoved her gun into her bra and clamped her hand over the wound.

“Those were activation words.”

“Yes.”

“Did they work?”

“No,” Bucky said weakly. “There are 10 words. It usually doesn’t start working until the fifth or sixth.”

“Usually.”

“Never by the third,” Bucky said. “But it was close.”

“Can anyone do that to you, or just her?”

“Anyone who knows the words,” Bucky says, his voice flat with shame. “And I’ll do anything they want. It’s part of the indoctrination protocol.”

“Christ,” Peggy said. “How long does it last?”

“If I’m fresh out of cryofreeze, two or three months,” Bucky said. “If I’ve been out for a while, only a week or two. It fades a little every time I sleep. I hid that from them.”

“How long has it been since the last time you were activated?”

“Five weeks,” Bucky said, retrieving the black duffel from beneath the cucumber crate. “And I’ve been out of cryofreeze for more than a year. Peggy, I’ll explain everything, I promise. But the police are coming. We have to get out of here.”

*****************************

She doesn’t remember what happened next, only that she awakens some time later, lying in the back seat of the Trabant with Bucky’s t-shirt wrapped around her arm and bound tightly with her stockings.

“Where are we?” she manages to mumble over the din of the engine, pulling herself up into a seated position. Her head swims a little from the effort, but settles soon enough. She’ll be all right for a while. She feels the Colt jutting against her hip as she sits; she pulls it out and checks the magazine—still loaded, save for the two bullets she left in the Russian woman. She presses the button on her watch but all she gets is static—they’re much too far out of range of her embassy contact, which means she’s on her own until she gets back to the West.

With the Soviets marching toward the border, she knows SHIELD and probably the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus in Central Europe is panicking right now, but she’s not. She never has.

“About an hour south of the city,” Bucky says. “We can make the Austrian border before sunrise, I think. You should lie back down, get some rest. We’re going to have to cross on foot and the terrain’s not going to be friendly.”

“I think I’d rather keep my eye on the road, thank you.”

She sees Bucky crack a knowing half-smile in the rearview mirror. “I gave you back your gun and you still don’t trust me.”

She doesn’t dignify that with an answer. “Where are the tapes?”

He reaches over to the passenger seat and lifts the paper bag high enough for her to see. “All present and accounted for.” She tries not to notice the Russian woman’s blood has seeped into the corner of the bag.

“Pull over,” Peggy says. “I’m coming up front.”

“You really should get some rest,” Bucky repeats. “That wound’s worse than it looks.”

“I’ll sleep when I get back to the West,” Peggy says tartly. “In the meantime, you’re going to tell me where you’ve been.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Isn't KrycekAsks' drawing awesome? If you've ever been to Prague, you know how perfectly they captured the rich, intricate textures of the city. It has so much energy--I love it!
> 
> Next up: Bucky explains how he escaped from HYDRA, and Peggy convinces him to take one last risk for Steve.


	3. Can’t Bury the Past

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky gestures toward the notebook. “Keep that, would you? Give it to him after I’m gone.”

Steve disappeared for more than six hours the night after Bucky died. They didn’t realize he was missing until he didn’t show up at the debriefing at SSR HQ; they didn’t realize he was really missing until he missed curfew, too.

Peggy eventually found him alone at the Whip & Fiddle, three hours after curfew, with three empty bottles of whiskey on the floor and a nearly-empty fourth sitting in front of him on the last remaining table in the place.

They drank to Bucky and Peggy tried uselessly to convince Steve that it wasn’t his fault, and when the whiskey was gone, Steve took Peggy’s hand and stood up.

She didn’t dare break the spell by asking what he wanted, for she already knew. She followed him back through the blacked-out city to his billet, a small apartment above a stationer’s store three blocks over from the women’s barracks.

He didn’t turn on the lights, and neither did she. The blackout curtains were open and the moon was bright, and that, apparently, was enough. Steve stepped in close, took her by the arms and kissed her, the stubble of his evening beard somehow velvety against her skin.

There was a thrilling urgency to his kiss; she allowed him to part her lips with his tongue and flick it inside, surging hard against the roof of her mouth and dragging it across the edges of her teeth in search of friction.

Peggy gave as good as she got, kissing him hard, biting and sucking on his lower lip, grabbing his hips and pulling him hard against her. Her need, dormant for so long, came roaring back to life at his touch.

She worked his belt loose and felt more than heard him hum approvingly against her mouth, so once the buckle was disposed of she got to work on the fly of his trousers, and then slid a questing hand down past the elastic waist of his shorts.

He was still soft, but she knew what to do; she closed her hand around his cock and began to stroke. Steve closed his eyes and went still for a moment, then got too distracted to kiss and simply pressed his forehead against hers as she went to work.

After a while—a long while—it began to firm up a little. Steve bit his lip, his eyes still closed, then slid his hand down over hers and began to control her grip, the strokes. They moved together more quickly now, and he finally began to harden for real.

“I can’t give you children,” he said out of nowhere, his voice stumbling a little over his breathing.

“What?”

“Erskine said I wouldn’t be able to,” he said. “It’s the serum. So you don’t have worry about it.”

“I’m not worried,” Peggy said, wondering if this was the reason behind his reluctance—this assumption that she would want children, and kissed him hard.

This time, he kissed her back with surprising delicacy. “Ah, is there anything you, ah—?" he said, not quite looking at her.

“There is,” she said, unbuttoning her blouse and loosening her bra. She took one of his hands and showed him how to cup her breast and excite her nipple with his thumb; he was tentative at first, but he was a quick study and soon caught on. It was a good game for him, learning how to elicit this gasp or that moan, she thought, and he aimed to win.

He began to work on her other breast, too, working his thumbs in delicious little circles, slowly and deliberately reducing her to a gasping, panting mess. After a minute or two, she slid her hand back down into his shorts; he’d softened a little in the interim and she used what little concentration she had available to warm him back up the way he was warming her.

He seemed to like this; he kept his eyes bashfully closed but he was beginning to color red, and his breathing was starting to quicken again. He bit his lip and rolled his hips a little against her hand as he hardened again beneath her grip.

“If you want—” she said unevenly, her knees so soft she wasn’t sure how much longer she could stand, “—if you want to put it inside me you can.”

Steve nodded and licked his lips. “Turn around,” he breathed.

“All right,” Peggy said uncertainly; she and Fred had never done this standing up, but maybe girls in New York were different. She dragged her knickers down and turned to face the wall, resting her forearms high against the peeling wallpaper and resting her forehead in the V of her wrists, as he pushed up her skirt and began to touch her with his cock.

He pushed in between her buttocks and began to rock his hips against her, one arm wrapped tight around her stomach and the other just beneath her breasts. He was just rubbing himself off between her cheeks, she realized to her dismay.

“Not there,” she said, gently but firmly, and then reached around and guided him to the right place, arching her back a little more so it was easier to find. “In there.”

He did as he was told, and after a couple of false starts, he began to ease his way inside. He was big and she wasn’t really wet enough, but Peggy Carter was nothing if not an expert in making do; she breathed through the pressure until her long-neglected muscles began to unhitch a little, making space for him within her body.

“Oh,” Steve said as he found his fit. “That’s—oh.”

“Better, eh?” Peggy said over her shoulder, he nodded, his eyes drifting up toward the ceiling. She slid her hand around to his bum to give herself some leverage and began to rock her hips.

Steve leaned against her, resting a forearm alongside hers on the wall and pressing his other hand hard and low against her belly, and began to thrust. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Steve was somewhere else--lost in his grief, she supposed--but she was too distracted to let it bother her much. She had needs, too.

Things moved quickly after that; ten strokes and he was done with a low, guttural groan. He pulled out and backed away, quickly pulling up his shorts and pants before Peggy quite registered that their encounter was over.

“I’m sorry,” he said, blushing hard. “I didn’t mean to—"

“Wait, darling,” Peggy laughed, grabbing his arm and drawing him close. “All’s not lost. Come here.”

He did and as he did she guided his hand beneath her skirt and began to rub his fingers against the tiny berry between her legs, feeling it stiffen with want beneath her touch, sending a warm, melting flush through her body. She moved Steve’s fingers in swift, sure circles, clutching Steve’s shirt and breathing hard against his chest.

After a minute, Steve caught on; she let him take it from there so she could press her breasts against him and curl her fingers tight into Steve’s hair, and then he began to drop sweet little kisses onto her forehead.

It was the kisses that tipped her over; pleasure flooded through her like a warm bath, and emerged with a loud, breathy sigh of release as she let her hand fall away and her body slump against his.

“Attagirl, Peg,” Steve said earnestly, kissing the top of her head. “Come on, let’s have a drink.”

She excused herself to the loo while Steve got the drinks, and the sight of her kiss-bitten lips and mussed hair in the mirror made her smile. The smile faded quickly, though, when she found herself wondering if the only reason he’d invited her home was because he wanted was some comfort after Bucky’s death. No, she told herself. It had to be the children. Men always assumed that was the only thing women wanted out of life—and on that count, men were almost always wrong.

She straightened her hair and buttoned her blouse, and there would probably be no hiding what she’d been up to when she returned to the women’s barracks that night, but it was worth it, she thought. 

“Was that your first time?” Peggy asked as she returned from the living room, keeping her tone light because she already knew the answer.

Steve shrugged and handed her a glass of whiskey. “Not yours, I take it.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Not at all,” Steve said, knocking back his glass and finishing it in a single swallow. “I’m glad one of us knew what to do.”

Peggy took a thoughtful sip of her drink. “You’re a very unusual man, Steven Rogers.”

Steve didn’t answer, just refilled his glass. “It doesn’t bother you that I can’t give you kids?”

“Can’t bloody well bring a baby to a war, can I?”

“The war’s not going to last much longer.”

“There’ll be another,” Peggy sighed, taking another sip of her drink. “Might as well stay ready.”

Steve held up his drink in a mock toast. “You’re a very unusual woman, Margaret Carter.”

“We make a good team, don’t we,” Peggy said. Unspoken—but clear, she hoped—was the implication that they could make a good team for a very long time.

The small smile on Steve’s face disappeared, but he nodded anyway and looked her straight in the eye. “You’re very important to me,” he said seriously. “Whatever happens, I want you to know that.”

“What’s going to happen, Steve?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. “I just mean—you never know, do you.”

“I suppose not,” Peggy said. She reached over and took his free hand in hers. “I’m so sorry, darling. I know he was like a brother to you.”

Steve gave her a wan smile and teared up a little. “Yeah,” he said after a speechless moment. “Like a brother.”

*****************************

Bucky’s humoring her, she knows, when he pulls off the road to let her climb into the front passenger seat. He even offers to let her drive, though they both know she can’t hold her gun and steer at the same time with her left arm shot through. It hurts like hell to move, but she grits her teeth and hauls herself out of the back seat, pauses for a moment to catch her breath, then grits her teeth again to ease herself as gently as she can manage into the front seat without falling. It’s not all that gentle.

“Put your head between your knees for a minute,” Bucky says. “You lost a lot of blood.”

“I’m fine,” Peggy says sharply, though she can’t get much force behind it with her head swimming as much as it is. “Let’s go.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, doffing an imaginary cap as he pulls out onto the roadway, and even though he does so smoothly, the motion makes her gorge rise in her throat, but she manages to swallow back the bile just in time.

She checks her pocket for the cigarette-packet-that-isn’t-a-real-cigarette-packet and lets out a deep sigh of relief when she finds it still there, buttoned into its secret compartment. She flips it open, presses on the third cigarette from the right to start recording, and places it on the dashboard between them. “Start at the beginning.”

“All right,” Bucky says, and his voice taking on a hard, distant quality. She recognizes that voice well, because she’ll never forget it—the tight, steady cadence he used back in ’43 to mask the undertow of horror he felt when he first described what had happened to the prisoners he saw in Zola’s lab at Kreichsberg.

“I don’t remember falling—I learned that much later. I woke up in a medical facility. I didn’t know what happened or how much time had passed or where I was. I couldn’t remember anything about myself. I still had all my knowledge and skills, but my identity was gone, or just—shadows. They spoke to me in Russian and I could understand them well enough, so when they told me my name was Yasha and that I was a HYDRA commando from Siberia and that I’d suffered a head injury, I believed them.”

But he couldn’t shake a growing sense of unease at his situation. The medical research facility was housed in an underground bunker with thick concrete walls and heavy, reinforced steel doors. There wasn’t much to it, just the medical lab, a small classroom where a tutor—they called him a speech therapist—helped him improve his Russian and a gymnasium where a trainer—they called him a physical therapist—taught him how to fight with his new arm. But there were more guards than scientists, some with dogs, all with machine guns.

He knew the technology in his new arm was top secret, but he’d been a soldier long enough to recognize that they were more interested in keeping people in than keeping them out.

“Once I noticed that, I realized I was a prisoner, not a patient. There was only one way out—an elevator behind two steel gates, each one guarded by two soldiers—but it was a way out, and I knew I had to take it.”

All his days were the same, so he simply picked one when he felt particularly well-rested and strong. After breakfast, he beat his Russian tutor to death, took his gun, and made a run for the gates. He killed the first two guards easily and took their keys, got through the first gate and shot the third guard before the fourth shot him with some kind of electrical weapon that paralyzed him.

“I don’t remember what happened after that, but I woke up shackled to my bed.” Bucky swallows hard and clears his throat. “After that, they initiated the indoctrination protocol.”

“Torture.”

“Yeah, they beat the hell out of me pretty good,” Bucky says with the kind of rueful familiar grin Peggy would have expected him to make after describing a bar brawl. His nonchalance is awful and false and she tries to clamp down the mounting sense of panic she’s begun to feel about his ordeal. “Starvation, sleep deprivation, electroshock, mind games, and—other things. You know. Anything to make you feel small.”

“Oh, Bucky,” she says, but he just waves her comment away irritably. He doesn’t want her sympathy.

It went on for months, he says—he could tell by how long his hair got. They scrambled his head so badly he didn’t know what was real and what was just the lies they fed him between beatings. They stripped him down, layer by layer, and by the time they were done, he wasn’t even Yasha anymore—they just called him Winter Soldier, because of how he’d been found. He knew, intellectually, that ordinary people did not live the way he did, but it was irrelevant. He was no longer ordinary. He was the Winter Soldier now. The Winter Soldier’s life had always been thus. It was the Winter Soldier’s duty to comply, and nothing else. He was to fight without question, kill without question, obey without question.

Once HYDRA was confident they’d achieved his complete submission, they needed a way to maintain his compliance without compromising his physical fitness. That was where the activation words came in—simple Pavlovian conditioning to remind him how badly they could hurt him if he didn’t follow his orders.

“You never believe you’ll break until you do,” Bucky says, his voice oddly matter-of-fact. “Then you’ll be ashamed of yourself for breaking, and they’ll use that against you, too, because that kind of shame–it’s like acid. It skins you alive and eats through your bones. You’ll do anything to avoid it. So eventually you tell yourself stories to make you think you’re in control. You surrender and tell yourself that you want it. And that’s how they get you.”

“Oh my God, Bucky.” She blinks back tears and fails; she reaches up gingerly with her left hand to wipe them away.

“Don’t you fucking dare pity me, Peg.”

“I don’t,” she says softly. “I _care_ about you. There’s a difference.”

“You care about the man I used to be,” he says stiffly.

“If that man was dead, I would be, too.”

In a movement so quick she can barely process it, he reaches over, grabs the gun out of her hand, and presses it hard against her jaw. “Don’t assume you won’t be before the night is out.”

Peggy lets out her breath slowly, forcing herself to remain calm. “You won’t kill me, Bucky,” she says carefully.

He swallows and nods and then uncocks the gun, fans his fingers away from the trigger, and gently places it back into her waiting hand. “You keep that,” he says gruffly. “Don’t trust me.”

“All right,” Peggy says, meeting his eyes. He’s terrified of hurting her, she realizes, then has to remind herself how easily he can. “I’ll be careful.”

He takes a deep breath and flexes his hand twice as if to purge the feeling of the gun from his hand before reaching for another cigarette.

“Once they were satisfied with my indoctrination, they began to train me on prisoners from a nearby gulag. Fighting and killing, mostly, but also kidnapping and interrogation techniques.” His voice is so soft, Peggy can barely hear him over the wind whipping in through the window. He shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

Peggy’s throat is burning with a sob she doesn’t dare voice. She can’t be sure how much of Bucky’s story is true, but she knows him well enough—or at least she used to know him well enough—to know his distress is genuine.

He waves vaguely at the landscape with the cigarette. “My first jobs were here in the Eastern Bloc taking out dissidents who were making life difficult for the Party.” Then they started him working on political rivals, anyone who stood in the way of whoever Malenkov or Bulganin or Khrushchev wanted to win an election. By 1950, they had enough confidence in him to send him further afield: Beirut, Shanghai, Melbourne, Delhi, Buenos Aires, and finally, by the mid-fifties, Western Europe and even the United States.

“What was that like? Coming back to the States for the first time?”

He shrugs. “Just another job. I liked being able to use English because it was still easier for me, but it had been almost 15 years since I first shipped out—I doubt I would have recognized anything anyway. Besides, they sent me to Dallas, not New York.”

“Dallas?”

He laughs a little. “I wasn’t responsible for Kennedy. It was a Saudi prince in town for an oil industry conference. I don’t know why he was targeted. I never knew why.”

“How many people have you killed?”

“Twenty-seven,” he says. “Eight Americans that I know of. Sometimes I didn’t know.”

“Do you remember them all?”

He winces. “I do.”

An angry, needy curiosity gets the better of her. “Nicosia, 1953. George Konstantino, SHIELD’s chief of station in Cyprus. Ring any bells?” she asks. “Pilar Garcia, Havana, 1959? Vinh Nguyen, Saigon, this past January?”

“What happens if I say yes?” Bucky asks, a gentle challenge in his voice. “Do you really want to find out I killed your agents here? Like this?”

“Don’t condescend to me, Bucky,” Peggy snaps, nodding at the recording device. “Answer the question.”

After a long moment, he nods. “Garcia and Nguyen, yes. Konstantino, no.”

Peggy exhales sharply to settle her grief. “God damn you.”

Bucky snorts and tips the cigarette out of the car. “Pretty sure He took care of that in 1945.”

“I knew them, you know,” she says sharply. “You might at least feign a little remorse.”

He’s quiet for a very long time, his jaw working silently as he decides how to respond. The more he thinks he angrier he gets, and when he finally speaks, his voice is vibrating with rage.

“You want to know what the worst part of what they did to me was?” he asks. “It wasn’t the torture or the rape or the fact that they made me murder all those people—it was that they made me believe I wanted to. They made me believe it was necessary. They made me believe I was proud of it.” He gives her a challenging look. “Hell, a part of me is _still_ proud of it, and that disgusts me more than anything. Remorse doesn’t even come close to what I feel right now.”

Peggy meets his gaze and doesn’t flinch. She can’t let him shock her. “Tell me how you broke free.”

“Whenever I was out of cryo for too long, the brainwashing would start to fade. My identity didn’t come flooding back all at once, or anything—it doesn’t work like that. But little by little I began to recover my own will, remember a little more about myself,” he says. “I couldn’t violate my orders, but I discovered I could do things that weren’t specifically prohibited. For example, one day, on a job in Bucharest, I remembered that I liked plums. I had some money with me and nobody told me not to go to the market, so I bought one, and it was so sour it almost turned my face inside out, but I ate it down to the pit anyway.”

He smiles a little at the recollection, and Peggy can’t help but smile too.

Every time he had another long mission, he began to test himself a little more. Once, during a job in Madrid, he slipped away to go to the Prado, because he remembered going to museums with someone he cared about. Another time, in Tel Aviv, he went down to the ocean, took his shoes off, and walked around in the surf a little bit because he remembered going to the beach as a child.

And then last year, he was crossing the National Mall in Washington in the middle of the night and he saw the Captain America and Bucky memorial, lit up by floodlights in front of the National Museum of American History. The base of the statue was covered in plaques about their lives and service—there was even one all about their childhood in Brooklyn.

He gives her a look of such complicated sadness that Peggy’s heart wants to break. “My heart started pounding and I started sweating and I knew I’d known him somehow. I read all the plaques around the base, and it all felt so familiar—but not quite real, like a dream that starts to fade as soon as you wake up. But I knew it was me standing next to him, and Steve—all I knew was that he was the most important person in the world to me. It was visceral, Peg. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had anything resembling an emotion, but I found myself standing there grieving him like I’d known him all my life.” He shakes his head, and there’s genuine wonder in his voice when he speaks again. “I didn’t know it was possible to care that deeply about someone and not remember them at the same time, but I did.”

“I believe it,” Peggy says after a moment. “For you two, I’d believe it.”

“I’m starting to understand that.”

“It must have been very painful to learn your own identity that way, though.”

“No, not really,” he says. “Steve I missed, but Bucky Barnes? Mostly I was just curious about him. I wondered how alike we were, how much of him I still had in me. Intellectually, I knew that if Bucky Barnes had died fighting HYDRA, then I hadn’t exactly come over to them willingly, but it was irrelevant, because I was the Winter Soldier now and I had orders to meet my exfiltration team at Rock Creek Park in two hours’ time.”

“That’s why you didn’t try to escape.”

“That’s why it never even occurred to me to try.”

It wasn’t until much later—that night and on the crushingly long, dull trip back to Siberia on a Libyan container ship that he began to remember pieces of the war. The memories were vague and fleeting, for the most part—a burst of fighting, a leaking tent, bone-deep exhaustion and constant hunger, the crunch of shattered stone beneath his feet as he walked through a bombed-out village. The Howling Commandos were mostly just watercolor smears of dirt and khaki and blood, but he knew he was bonded to them deeply, that they had been through terrible things together and survived, that they would give their lives for each other without hesitation.

Steve was the clearest—a blur of blue and blond, smelling of bay rum and sweat, with a rare, quiet laugh that made even the Winter Soldier smile to recall.

The memories didn’t trouble him at first—they were just curiosities, strange birds or odd pebbles he might notice on one of his 20-mile training runs through the larch forest in the valley below the research facility.

It turned out to be a busy year for the KGB—Bucky was going back out into the field so often they didn’t bother with cryo. The idle weeks between missions gave him even more opportunities to remember, to puzzle over the location of this battle or that snowstorm. It became a private little game he played to pass the time, trying to imprint the faces he’d seen etched into the bronze plates on the memorial’s plinth onto the images in his mind.

Finally, in Iceland, when the pilot asked him about the Valkyrie, Steve’s face finally snapped into focus. But it wasn’t the man in the helmet he’d seen on the memorial that surfaced in his mind. Rather, it was the softer, more delicate face he’d been wearing the night Bucky shipped out for England.

“It felt like—” he begins, lifting his eyes to the night sky, then shaking his head. “Never mind. I knew I had to save him, no matter what.”

“That’s how I remember him, too,” Peggy says. “You know I have a photo of him in my office that way. Sometimes I think that big body was just another mask the Army gave him to wear.”

Bucky hums in agreement and falls silent for a few moments, before suddenly breaking into a rueful grin. “You want to know what I always remember when I think about you?” he asks. “The black eye you gave me when I lifted the hem of your skirt with the barrel of my gun.”

“You deserved that,” she says tartly.

“I’m sure I did,” he says, his smile fading. “I don’t think I was always a nice person.”

“No,” Peggy says truthfully. “But I believe you’re a good one.”

That prompts a bitter laugh from him. “They say the serum enhances what you already are, and I’ve got 27 murders on behalf of the Soviet Union to show for it. So help me understand where the good comes in.”

“After everything they did to you—after everything they made you do—you’re still here trying to save Steve,” Peggy says. “It’s rare man whose goodness could endure the evil done to you.”

“Don’t,” Bucky says, shaking his head. “Peg, you’re telling stories to yourself again. You can’t trust me.”

“Are you lying about Steve? Are we not actually driving toward the Austrian border? Was that business with the woman back there just an act to trick me into trusting you? Is this all just an elaborate trap to kidnap me? Are the Soviets planning to ambush us in Greenland?” Peggy asks rapidly, angrily. “If you haven’t realized I’ve already considered that, you’ve grossly underestimated me.”

“I learned a long time ago never to underestimate you, Peg.”

“No,” Peggy says. “You never did.”

*****************************

When the signs for the approaching Austrian border begin to appear, he nods at the black duffel bag at her feet. “There’s something in there I want you to have. A notebook.”

She gingerly takes her gun in her useless left hand—it’s merely a formality now, and they both know it—and reaches down to unzip the bag with her right. She feels about between weapons and clothes and bundles of cash until her fingers contact the well-worn cardboard spine of a Soviet-made school composition book.

“What’s this?”

“Everything I remember about Bucky Barnes’ life. There’s still a lot missing.”

She brings it out and opens it to a random page. It’s too dark in the car to read, but if she brings it up close to her face, she can make out Bucky’s familiar pencil scrawl. It’s written in a mix of English and Russian, she can tell, and if she looks very closely, she can pick out the names “Stevie” and “Dolores.”

“Who’s Dolores?” Peggy asks.

“Gal I wasted our train fare trying to win a stuffed bear for at Rockaway Beach the summer before I shipped out,” he says. “We had to hitch a ride home on an ice truck instead. I was afraid Stevie was going to murder me in my sleep after that—he was so angry at me.”

“Steve could never stay angry at you for long,” Peggy says, closing the book and holding it on her lap. “He loved you.”

He winces and shakes his head a little, though Peggy doesn’t think it’s because he disagrees. His eyes glitter a little.

“You were still listed as his next of kin when he went down, of course,” she says. “Phillips didn’t know what to do with his belongings after he crashed, so he gave it all to me. I still have his footlocker in my attic back home. I couldn’t bear to throw any of it away.”

“I expect he’ll be glad you kept it, then,” he says carefully. “Be nice to have a little bit of something familiar when he comes out of the ice.”

“His sketchbooks were in it,” she says evenly.

“You looked through them.”

“It was all I had left of him.”

“Those drawings weren’t—” he trails off and shakes his head, too weary to deny it.

“Steve never would have been happy with me,” she says after a minute. “That’s a painful thing for me to admit, but after I saw his notebooks—in a way, it was liberating, you know? Because I knew then that it never would have worked, and it allowed me to move on. Or move forward, rather.” She reaches up to the recording device and switches it off. “If you’ve been telling me the truth all this while, don’t start lying now.”

He rubs his mouth and goes for yet another cigarette. “I can’t talk about this now, Peg,” he says hoarsely. “Please don’t make me.”

“I won’t judge you,” Peggy says quickly. “I don’t—I don’t believe that’s a sin, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I don’t give a damn what you think about where I like to dip my wick,” Bucky snaps. “I can’t talk about _him_ like that. _Us_. Not yet.”

“All right,” Peggy says, backing off.

He gestures toward the notebook. “Keep that, would you? Give it to him after I’m gone.”

“Where are you going, Bucky?”

Bucky doesn’t answer.

“You have no intention of coming with me once we get across the border, do you?” Peggy says, realization dawning.

He gives her a tight smile. “You honestly think the U.S. government is going to let me anywhere near Steve in either of our lifetimes?”

“We fought the Red Skull with Captain America,” Peggy says. “Nothing’s impossible.”

He attempts a half-smile at that, but it quickly fades.

“It only took them what, three days to find you this time?” Peggy protests. “Four?”

“Once I’m in the West it’ll be a little harder for them to catch up with me.”

“So what, that buys you a couple of weeks, a month?”

He shrugs almost imperceptibly.

“I just want to be free for a little while, you know?” he says. He pats his chest with his metal hand. “I don’t want to die fighting their war.”

“They might not mean to kill you, you know,” Peggy says gravely. “All they have to do is say the words to make you come home.”

“I don’t plan to let them get close enough to talk,” Bucky says softly. “It’s okay, Peg. It’s my choice.”

“No,” Peggy says.

“No?”

“I won’t let you do that,” she says, her mind buzzing through possibilities as she speaks. “If you let me bring you in, we can protect you.”

“I’ve killed eight Americans, Peg. If I let you bring me in, the U.S. government will execute me. I’d rather eat a bullet in a nice hotel room in Paris than put Steve or my family through that.”

“I’m meant to become the director of SHIELD in a few months,” Peggy says. “There’s a lot I can make happen.”

“You can ensure my safety?”

“I promise,” Peggy says, hoping her words are true. “Do you trust me?”

He’s quiet for a long minute. “I trusted you the minute I saw you walk into the bar.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus concludes Part 1! In Part 2, we shift to Bucky's POV as the hunt for Steve gets under way and Bucky faces his worst demons.


	4. Purgatory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A surprised look crosses her face. “Excuse me?”
> 
> “Steve Rogers. Did you find him yet?”
> 
> She shakes her head regretfully. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mind the tags.

**PART 2: THE RAFT**  
**August 24, 1968  
** **(Bucky)**

He knows almost as soon as he awakens that the arm is gone. He metabolizes anesthesia far quicker than any human; less than a minute after he opens his eyes, his head is clear enough to register that the weight on his left side is all wrong, that his shoulder is painful and stiff. He doesn’t look at first—he knows if he does, he’ll panic, so instead he tries to lift his right hand to touch it. But it’s bound with thick steel shackles to the bed rail. An experimental tug suggests he might just be able to pull the bedrail itself off, but he doesn’t. He promised Peggy he’d cooperate.

Instead, he fixes his eyes firmly on the ceiling and rolls his bandaged shoulder carefully, trying not to gasp from the pain, trying to work out how much they took. The arm itself, of course, but they seem to have also removed the socket and the articulated steel support plates that had been fused to his chest and back to help deflect the force of his punches and prevent him from fracturing his bones. But, he notices, squirming a little against the mattress to shift the bandage against his skin, they’ve left the cybernetic nodes intact beneath his skin. Which means they might still give him the arm back once they determine it’s safe.

Or rather, when they determine _he's_ safe. 

Bucky and Peggy had abandoned the Trabant at the Austrian border and crossed on foot through a thinly fortified stretch of forest that relied too heavily on a triple layer of barbed-wire fencing and not enough on human eyes. Barbed wire was no match for his left hand; he tore it away as easily as he might have torn down cobwebs. Once they reached Austrian soil, Peggy activated the exfiltration beacon in her watch, and two hours later, SHIELD’s Vienna deputy chief of station—a friend of Peggy’s—met them personally at the edge of the forest to collect them and drive them back to Vienna.

Peggy had given Bucky a long, hard stare until he nodded, then turned to her friend. “He’s coming, too,” she said. “I’ll explain later.”

Back in Vienna, SHIELD parked him in a holding cell (that couldn’t actually hold him, though he wasn’t about to enlighten them to that fact) and gave him something to eat while Peggy’s injuries were seen to by the embassy doctor. Fitting, he thought, that his journey would begin and end in an Austrian prison. 

When she came down to see him in the brig an hour later, arm neatly bandaged and carried in a sling, her appearance startled him. In the unforgiving fluorescent lights, he could finally see how much older than him she really was now—her middle thickened from two pregnancies, her hair still thick but duller, her face pinched and a little sallow, with crow’s feet and frown lines that hadn’t been there during the war. Battle scars, he thought. While he’d been intermittently flickering through his own half-life, she’d gone and lived hers.

He was more grateful to her for that than she’d ever know because he knew it would make Steve happy to know it. Or at least feel less guilty about being so ambivalent about spending his life with her in the first place—and maybe that’s all anyone could ask for under the circumstances.

“I’m leaving for Greenland tonight,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll have his—" and her eyes met his in a panic. She had been about to say _his body_. Even now, she couldn't allow herself the luxury of hope. "Ah, hopefully we’ll have _him_ by Wednesday or Thursday latest.” 

“And where am I going?” he asked evenly. Not with her—how stupid he'd been to hope he'd be allowed to do that. _Trust but verify_. He had Peggy's trust, but until Steve was found—

He could already tell from the set of her jaw that she wasn’t happy.

“Not the SHIELD safehouse I had in mind for you,” she said sharply, and he could tell that she’d already lost her first battle for him. “But even I have to answer to the president, and President Johnson wants nothing more than for you to answer for those eight American deaths.”

“I understand,” Bucky said, with more relief than he expected to feel, given that he’d just found himself in danger of the very death he’d been willing to commit suicide to avoid. He was just ready for this to be over.

“We’ve negotiated to keep you in SHIELD custody, at least,” she said. “If Steve is where you say he is, we may be able to revisit the terms of the deal.”

“And if you can’t?”

Peggy gave him a wan smile but didn’t answer the question. Instead, she stepped up to the bars and reached through with her good arm to catch his left hand in hers, her thumb tracing small circles against the metal plates.

“It’s warmer than I thought it would be,” she said, leaning her head against the bars, looking down at their clasped hands. “This isn’t over yet. I’m never going to stop fighting for you.”

He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “If they do send me to prison, don’t tell him where I am, okay? I don’t want him to worry about me. Tell him I died in Prague.”

She didn’t agree, but she sniffled and released his hand to wipe her eyes. “Look what a mess you’ve made of me,” she scolded with a little laugh, inspecting a smear of mascara on the back of her hand.

“Aw, Peg, you’ll always be the prettiest girl in the room,” he said, and it wasn’t a lie. He’d have happily courted and married her in another life, and even though that life was impossible he still sometimes felt nostalgic for it anyway.

“Flatterer,” she said lightly, and he realized how nice it was that someone still remembered the cocky, charming boy he’d been during the war, dead and gone though he was. “I’ll send word when it’s done, all right? And then we’ll fix this. I’m going to bring you both home if it’s the last thing I do.”

*****************************

They hadn’t told him they were planning to detach the arm before they sedated him for the flight out of Vienna (for their safety, not his) but he’s not surprised. Peggy was right: It was a weapon first and foremost. The fact that it made it easier to tie his shoes was incidental.

The fact that it made sense didn’t make it easier, though. He barely remembered those few blurry weeks between the fall and the new arm; couldn’t remember at all what it felt like not to have anything there. He only remembered the horror of finding this strange metallic parasite welded to his body afterward. But at least there’d been something _there_, even before they switched it on, even when it was just a dead machine he’d had to carry around in a sling until his bones fully bonded with the alloy.

Now he’s got nothing.

After permitting himself a few seconds’ distress over the matter, he reels himself back in by reminding himself that the KGB had predicted the arm’s failure when they gave it to him; they had trained him to fight one-handed in the event it was damaged during a mission, and while he hoped he wouldn’t need to use that skill now, he figured he could manage everything else well enough, too.

A quick inventory suggests everything else is present and in good working order; he’s a little thirsty and he has to piss, but aside from the shoulder, nothing else seems to be injured. So far, so good.

He’s in a bright, clean hospital room, state-of-the-art as far as he can tell—none of the chipped avocado tile and flickering fluorescent bulbs of the KGB medical facility where they’d first attached his arm. Or was it the HYDRA facility in Austria? Whichever it was, there was none of that moldy, bloody, raw-sewage smell, either—his nose is practically itching with the scent of disinfectant. Wouldn’t do to have their prize prisoner rotting from sepsis before they have a chance to interrogate him, he supposes. He’d like to think the Americans will be more humane than the KGB, but they did just relieve him of his arm without warning or permission, so he’s not holding his breath.

The click of the door’s latch startles him, and he jerks his head up to see a nurse come in. She’s a young Latina, thick Texas border accent, very strong—a nurse, maybe, but the chevrons on her sleeve mean she’s a soldier first. She’s carrying a cattle prod in a holster at her hip.

A bitter bubble of anxiety rises in his chest; he knows they’ve probably just given it to her for protection, but his body isn’t getting the message.

She gives him a disorientingly kind smile. “Good morning, James. I’ve come to check your incisions,” she says brightly, approaching his bed without fear and begins to peel his bandages away. He turns his head toward the wall so he doesn’t have to watch.

She manipulates the stump of his arm with a gentle, firm touch and makes an approving noise as she runs her thumb along long, tender cut where they’d peeled his skin away to excise the alloy attachments from his bones. “You really do heal fast. I think we can take these stitches out today. Are you in any pain?”

“Not really,” he lies, his voice rough against his dry throat.

“Thirsty?”

He nods.

“Let me just wrap you back up and I’ll get you something to drink.” She finishes taping new gauze over his wound and fetches a cup of water and a paper straw from the counter across the room. “I’m going to raise your head a bit. Let me know if you get dizzy.”

He does, but he doesn’t say anything. He feels marginally less vulnerable sitting up—he can move his arm a little this way—and the cold water seems to take the edge off his nausea. He can tolerate this. 

“Did you find Steve?” he asks, tonguing the straw away when he’s done.

A surprised look crosses her face. “Excuse me?”

“Steve Rogers. Did you find him yet?”

She shakes her head regretfully. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is.”

“You’ve never heard of Captain America?”

She laughs at that. “_That_ Steve Rogers? Honey, he’s been dead since we were in diapers.”

“Never mind,” He says, swallowing his disappointment back. Of course the nurse wouldn’t know anything—Steve’s rescue would be a covert operation, classified to the highest degree.

Steve’s status was a puzzle for later. Right now he has to demonstrate sufficient compliance to get out of this bed.

“Any chance I could get up to take a leak?” he asks.

“I don’t have the key, I’m sorry,” she says, reaching under the bed and producing an oddly-shaped plastic jug. “You can use this.”

He eyes it skeptically, then flexes his shackled right hand to illustrate his dilemma. “How?”

With bright, brisk efficiency, she reaches under the sheet, pulls up the hem of his gown, and positions the jug over his cock. “Like this,” she says, then turns her gaze skyward. It’s as much privacy as he’s going to get.

The panic rises again. This is how it starts, of course—the little restrictions, the small indignities, the slow chipping-away of his agency. Soon the bed will go, and then the blanket, and then the gown. Nurses will give way to guards. He’ll be shackled to the wall, the chain too short for him to reach below his waist, with nothing but a bucket to manage his needs no-handed, a bucket that will stink as it fills and grows heavier, that will get harder to shift into place with his feet until he accidentally knocks it over and has to sit in it until the guards come to beat him for his clumsiness. They may not clean it up right away, either, but when they do, they’ll turn the hose on him, too, scouring his skin bloody until the water runs pink.

Then they’ll stop giving him the bucket, and only when the guards can’t stand the smell any longer will they hose it away, along with the scabs on his skin from the last time. This will go on until he’s used to it, until he starts to believe it’s always been this way, that it’s supposed to be this way. And that’s only the beginning.

He makes a small involuntary noise of distress and the nurse’s attention jerks from the ceiling to his face in the space of a blink. Her arm moves when she does, just close enough that he can grab her wrist.

“Sir, please don’t—”

“Are you a good person?” he asks sharply.

“What?”

“Are you a good person?”

“I hope so,” she says earnestly. “I try to be.”

He nods, and only then does he notice tears are running down his face. He doesn’t care. “My name is Bucky. It says James on my paperwork, but I’ve always been called Bucky. Will you help me remember that?”

“Sir, what—”

“Please,” he says, and he’s begging now. “No matter what they do to me, don’t let me forget it, all right?”

“We’re not going to _do _anything to you,” she says gently, closing her hand around his. “We believe in the Geneva Convention around here. I know this isn’t where you want to be, but we’ll keep you safe, I promise.”

“You took my arm.”

She gives him a tight smile. “No weapons allowed in prison.”

“It’s still my goddamned arm. You expect me to believe it’s going to stop there?”

She bites her lip and glances down at the bed. Absurdly, she’s still holding the jug against his groin. “Bucky,” she says, putting force behind the name, “I know you don’t trust us yet. I’ve seen your scars and I can’t imagine what you’ve been through. But whatever happens, I swear on my mother I won’t let you forget your name.” 

“Thank you,” he says softly, releasing her hand. He knows he shouldn’t believe her, knows that kindness is a trick like all the others, but what choice does he have? He’s too weak to fight and he’s so tired of being afraid. He turns his face away from her and allows himself to pee. It's the last thing he remembers doing before the world goes black again.

*****************************

It was the Fourth of July and Steve was turning 23. He’d stubbornly held on to his ma’s apartment, working as an illustrator for the Federal Arts Project and taking in freelance ad work on the side when he could. It was a slim living but it kept the rent paid and the lights on most of the time, and the leftovers Bucky’s ma sent him home with every Sunday after supper were usually enough to make his groceries stretch the week.

Bucky had a good job as a pipefitter’s apprentice at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and he’d been bugging Steve for months about moving in. He said it was because he was too old to be living at home anymore, but really it was because that April Steve’d had an asthma attack in the middle of the night and almost couldn’t get to his adrenaline in time. And though he’d never allowed himself to interrogate the meaning behind his feelings, Bucky was afraid that if Steve died, he’d die too.

Of course Steve had seen right through him and said no, he was fine on his own, but Bucky hadn’t given up just yet.

For now, they were sitting on Steve’s fire escape, sticky with sweat and roaring drunk, as the fireworks crackled above.

Everyone else in the neighborhood was up on their roofs to watch; Steve was watching them, too, but Bucky was watching Steve. Watched the colors splash across the delicate planes of Steve’s face and sparkle in his big blue eyes, watched the sweet, dimpled corners of his mouth quirk up a little bit whenever a new pattern burst across the sky. Watched the way he hung one slender leg over the edge of the fire escape, swinging it idly like he had since they were kids, leaning back on his arms so he could get a better view of the sky.

And then, Bucky never knew why, Steve turned his face up toward Bucky with a look Bucky couldn’t decipher. Like an expectant question, if that was possible.

“Those fireworks are really something, huh, Buck?” Steve had said, not taking his eyes off him.

“Ordered ‘em up special for your birthday,” Bucky said, grinning over his beer.

Steve rolled his eyes and bumped Bucky’s arm with his shoulder. “You say that every year.”

“Beats having to buy you a present every year.”

“Aww, you sure know how to make a dame feel special.”

Bucky had choked a little at that but Steve had just laughed and tried to swipe the beer out of his hand. And then, though Bucky didn’t know why (he knew exactly why), he managed to catch and trap Steve’s thumb with his pinky instead, holding it tight against the bottle.

“Oh, so that’s how it’s gonna be,” Steve giggled, waggling the rest of his fingers in mock helplessness. The glass was slick with condensation—even Steve could get out of that grip. “What do I gotta do to get a beer around here? Answer three riddles?”

“I don’t know any riddles,” Bucky said pointlessly, then leaned down and kissed him.

Steve’s mouth went rigid with surprise beneath Bucky’s and he jerked away almost immediately.

“Sorry,” Bucky said quickly, flushing hot and cold all at once because in all the hundreds of times he’d thought about it he never thought he’d actually do it. “Just goofing around.”

“No, you weren’t,” Steve said, but he didn’t seem angry or put out at all.

Emboldened by Steve’s lack of anger—which was to say, drunk—Bucky asked, “What if I wasn’t, then?”

Steve sat up and held out his hand for the beer. “Lemme have that.”

Bucky passed it to him, and Steve took a long pull, looking at Bucky the entire time. Then, before Bucky could understand what was happening, Steve set the empty bottle roughly aside and darted forward, planting the softest, sweetest of kisses on Bucky’s mouth. And then, before Bucky could even catch his breath, he did it again.

Then he rocked back and leaned against the window, twining his fingers through Bucky’s. “How long’ve you known I like boys?” he asked.

“I didn’t.”

“Sure you did.”

“I dunno,” Bucky admitted. “I had a feeling.”

“’Cause you do too.”

“I like girls fine.”

Steve held up their interlaced hands as proof. “Doesn’t mean you don’t like boys too.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Then what’s it like?”

“I dunno,” Bucky repeated.

“Behold, Bucky Barnes, the Great Introspector.”

“Shut up.”

“You never thought about it?”

“What’s the point?” Bucky said. “I’m gonna marry a girl.”

“I’m not.”

“People’ll talk.”

“Nobody’s ever going to look at me and wonder why I couldn’t find a wife, Buck,” Steve said, rolling his eyes.

“Hey, cut it out,” Bucky muttered, squeezing his hand. “That’s my best friend you’re talking about there.”

Steve laughed softly and shook his head. “You can stop doing that, you know,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Trying to protect me from all the shit the world throws at me,” Steve said. “I can take it.”

“I know you can,” Bucky said. “But you don’t have to.”

*****************************

There must have been a sedative in his IV, because the next time he awakens, he’s in a different bed—one with a thick wool blanket and a decent pillow. The light is dim—it must be night. His arm is still gone, and now the bandages are, too.

He pushes the covers away and eases himself up into a sitting position, taking inventory of his person as he does; he’s wearing a set of orange scrubs now, thick gray socks and a thick gray long-sleeved undershirt beneath it. Without looking down, he reaches up under the hem of his shirt to inspect the stump of his left arm. The pain is still dizzying when he touches it, like a thousand exposed nerves all at once.

He knows, from one briefing or another over the years, that his remaining humerus is approximately eight centimeters long—barely three inches. It’s not really even a limb anymore, so much as a knob of flesh and bone to anchor the deeper muscles of his back and chest to. He runs his hand over it, cups his hand over it, finds he can wiggle it a little if he contracts a certain muscle in his back.

He should be panicking, he thinks. He knows if he looks at it, he will, so he doesn’t.

He moves on to his torso, runs his hand back along his shoulder blade to confirm that the cybernetic nodes are really there; three little nubs beneath his skin confirm that they are, fitted with little rubber caps to protect them in the shower. (A nice touch.) He presses each one in turn; each sends a juddering jolt to his spine. They’re still active. Good.

He knows they’re not going to let him have a pin, so he gathers up his loose left sleeve and double knots it up to keep it from flapping around, and when he does, the small heavy mass brushes against his ribcage when he moves. It’s not the same as the arm, but it feels better to feel something there.

The room is warmer than the hospital but feels colder; a quick touch of the wall confirms that it’s made of steel. He gives it a quick rap and there’s no vibration at all. It’s thick steel, built to hold men even stronger than he. Everything else in the room is steel, too—the bed itself, the table bolted to the wall opposite him, the stool bolted to the floor in front of it, the half-height partition in the back that likely shields a toilet.

The front wall of the cell is completely transparent—thick plexiglass or some such, he assumes, with rows of ventilation holes punched through it every three feet or so. There’s a two-way drawer at about waist height that’s probably for passing items back and forth without touching. It looks out onto some kind of guard station—a mainframe computer with dozens of small security monitors mounted into it, casting an eerie green glow around the room.

There are two guards at the desk; one typing two-fingered on a typewriter, one eating an apple, neither paying very close attention to him. There’s a small radio on the desk, and Bucky can tell from the cadence of the announcer and the occasional tinny cheers they’re listening to a baseball game, though he can’t quite hear the words.

He stands carefully—he’s off-balance from the missing arm and he’s still a little fuzzy from the sedative—and shambles up to the plexiglass. His legs feel sloppy and loose, but his knees seem to be holding up all right.

The guards don’t seem to notice him until he knocks on the glass and speaks. “I need to speak to Peggy Carter,” he says.

Apple looks up in surprise. “You were supposed to be out all night,” he says apologetically.

“Peggy Carter,” Bucky says. “Or Chester Phillips, or Howard Stark. It’s important.”

Apple laughs. “How about President Johnson, too?” Then to Typewriter: “Who were we supposed to call about this one again?”

By way of an answer, Typewriter hands him a file. Apple looks at it, glances at Bucky, then snaps the folder closed and strides out of the room.

“She promised she’d send word about—something important,” he says, pressing his hand hard against the plexiglass, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice.

“SHIELD’ll talk to you when they want to talk to you, not the other way around,” Typewriter says. “Might as well try to get some sleep.”

“Am I allowed to know where I am?” Bucky asks. “I believe the Geneva Convention says I’m allowed to know where I am.”

Typewriter snorts. “That’s rich, a Russky citing the Geneva Convention.”

“I’m not—” _Your name is Yasha Barinov. You’re an orphan from the city of Madagan, in Siberia. You were a sniper in the Red Army before you were recruited to HYDRA Special Forces. We have a new mission for you, comrade._ “It doesn’t matter. It still applies.”

“The United States,” Typewriter says.

“It’s a big country.”

He shrugs. “The East Coast,” he says.

Bucky sighs. “What about the date?”

“August 23,” he says, then glances at the clock on the wall. It reads 00:27. “Er, 24th, I guess, now.”

“Saturday?” Bucky shivers a little. If it’s Saturday, Steve’s fate has almost certainly already been sealed.

“Saturday,” Typewriter confirms. “Hope you didn’t have a big date planned.”

“Has there been any—news?” Bucky asks. “Anything big happen this week?”

Typewriter opens a foil packet of peanuts and shoves a small handful into his mouth. “Your people invaded one of those little buttfuck countries in Eastern Europe on Wednesday. Sokovia, something like that?”

“Czechoslovakia,” Bucky says. “It’s not really that little.”

“Whatever,” Typewriter says, then pauses, sighs, and switches the radio off. “Also, the Giants just creamed the Dodgers.”

“Anything else?”

“What, you want me to read the whole goddamned _New York Times_ to you as a bedtime story?” Typewriter asks irritably, then holds up a plastic Thermos. “You hungry? They left some soup for you.”

Bucky sighs. It’s clear this guy doesn’t know anything, either. He’s not that hungry, but he wants to see how the drawer works so he nods. “Sure.”

Typewriter stands up—he’s tall and he’s very, very big and Bucky would think twice about challenging him hand-to-hand even with both arms—and places the Thermos into the drawer chamber and passes it through.

The drawer is wide and deep—about the size of a small laundry basket—and he realizes that his missing arm affords him one advantage: If he can tear the drawer out of the wall, he might be able to squeeze through the opening.

He files this away for later, and takes the Thermos.

The soup is just lukewarm beef broth, but it’s salty and rich and filling enough. Better than he expected of prison, but this was no ordinary gulag.

He forces himself to drink it slowly, though—he knows from long experience he needs to give his stomach some time to acclimate to food again. He goes back out to his bed and sits on it, drinking his soup and trying not to think about the Soviets reaching Steve before Peggy does.

Tries not to think about him waking up chained to a wall in a freezing cold cell, confused and alone, calling out until he loses his voice, until his head swims with hunger and he goes mad with thirst. Tries not to think of the moldy bread and rotten horsemeat they’ll feed him, the fetid cups of water they’ll give him—just enough to keep him alive, but not strong, not clear-headed.

How they’ll keep the lights on all the time so he can’t sleep, how they’ll set off sirens and strobes any time he finally manages to drift off for more than an hour or two. How they’ll immobilize him with the cattle prods and beat him with brass knuckles and kick him with their steel-toed boots until he’s fetal and weeping. How they’ll splay him flat on the filthy floor and rape him with the rubber truncheon before leaving him alone in the dark for an hour, a day, a week—he’ll never know.

In the dark, his only company will be the lies they feed him over an intercom; telling him his name is Stefan from Leipzig or Istvan from Budapest, Esteban from Buenos Aires or Etienne from Montreal, until Stevie from Brooklyn just fades away into the crowd inside his head. Sometimes they’ll blindfold him and take him to the electroshock suite; strap him down and gag him and pour electricity into his brain until he can’t remember what year it is before dragging him back to the darkened cell. And then the lights will come on and it’ll start all over again.

The only words they’ll speak during the beatings will be the activation words, always the same words, always the same sequence. Each associated with a different, escalating degree of excruciating pain. But they’ll always save the truncheon for the end, and after a while he’ll beg for it, just to make the beatings stop, and they’ll laugh and oblige, until that’s all they have to do to get him to obey.

And then one day they won’t even need to do that. The words will be enough. And he’ll be ready.

He’ll be spared Zola’s burning blue liquid pumped into his veins, at least, the days of muscle cramps and bone pain so severe it will blind and deafen him to anything else, but Steve’s strength won’t save him in the end. No, it’ll be a curse, because it only means it’ll take longer to break him. If they’re not careful, his mind will go before his body does. If they’re not careful, he’ll end up with a bullet in the base of his skull, just another failed experiment for the incinerator.

Bucky’s gorge rises and he runs to the toilet to vomit up all the soup he’s just drunk. He sits back heavily on the tile floor, leaning his back against the cool steel privacy partition, trying wrangle his shallow stuttering breath into some kind of rhythm as his heart scrabbles like a trapped animal inside his chest.

“Please find him, Peggy,” he whispers, drawing his knees up to his chest and holding them as tightly as he can, rocking and sobbing and trying desperately to keep himself sane. “Please. Please. Please. Please. Please.”

*****************************

Eventually he calms. It’s not the first time he’s had a panic attack—they become more frequent the more time passes since his last activation—but it still feels like vivisection every time.

He hauls himself up, rinses out his mouth, and returns to the main part of the cell. The thermos is still half-full; the soup’s cold by now but he doesn’t care—his head is pounding and he knows he needs the nourishment. He drinks the soup quickly, too hungry to coddle his stomach. If he pukes again, so be it.

He doesn’t puke.

The worst of the storm is past, but he’s still feeling anxious and fretful; he knows he’s exhausted but he doesn’t even bother considering lying down. Instead, he paces, fingering the tangles out of his hair, absently scratching at his beard, sliding his hand up under his shirt to run his palm across his belly in some strange approximation of human contact.

Eventually exhaustion begins to catch up with him, and he climbs back under the covers of his bed. He has no idea what tomorrow has in store, but he can’t bring himself to care anymore, so he curls up with his pillow against his chest and sleeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Bucky receives a surprising visitor.


	5. Peel Back the Skin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A pained look flickers across Xavier’s face. “I’m offering you a chance to break HYDRA’s chains, Sergeant Barnes. Will you take it?”

Bucky woke around midnight with a beam of moonlight flung bright across the bed and an arm verging on numb from the weight of Steve’s head on his shoulder.

It had been three months since that first kiss on the fire escape—three months of more kissing and snuggling and touching and stolen evenings at Steve’s place with the radio turned loud as they fucked each other with their hands, first, and then their mouths. There were cool baths in the kitchen tub on hot summer nights and there was dancing to the slow songs when they were feeling sappy and there were dates to movies and diners and, best of all, Coney Island, where they could stare at each other openly from behind their sunglasses.

It was impossible and it was true, this thing they had, and it couldn’t last forever—Bucky understood the world they lived in even if Steve did not—but that didn’t make it any less precious while it was still theirs to have.

Bucky kissed the top of Steve’s head and nudged him a little with his chin. “Move. My arm’s asleep,” he mumbled.

“So was I,” Steve complained, shifting his weight. As he did, the hand that was slung across Bucky’s belly brushed the tip of his cock and woke him up in a hurry.

“We got better things to do than sleep,” Bucky said, kissing the top of his head again and wiggling his hips a little.

Steve hummed and closed his hand around Bucky’s cock and began to stroke, eliciting a deep groan of pleasure. “We sure do,” he said, in a voice so low and lascivious Bucky almost laughed until he realized Steve was serious.

“You got something specific in mind?”

Steve craned his neck up and kissed him. “Very specific.” He grabbed the pot of Vaseline from the nightstand and got to work slicking Bucky up.

“Slow down,” Bucky laughed, grabbing his wrist. His breath was already growing shallow in his lungs.

“I’m done,” Steve said, scooping another dab of slick onto his fingers and reaching behind his back. He bit his lower lip and sighed a little as he fingered himself, working the Vaseline deeper and deeper into his ass.

Then he tossed the bedcovers back and climbed over to straddle Bucky’s hips, letting the tip of Bucky’s cock press into him between his cheeks.

“Oh,” Bucky breathed.

“You wanna?” Steve asked, rolling his hips a little, and Bucky groaned.

“Hell yes,” Bucky said hoarsely.

Steve grinned and took his own cock into his Vaseline-slick hand. He straddled Bucky’s lap and rolled his hips against Bucky’s cock while he slowly jerked himself off. His smile fell away and his face took on a kind of lazy intensity that Bucky recognized instantly. He closed his eyes and bit his lip and rolled his hips and stroked his cock and Bucky watched it all unfold like the bluest goddamned movie he’d ever seen.

He put his hands on Steve’s hips and pressed his cock in further between his cheeks, till it touched his hole, and Steve’s eyes drifted open and he smiled again. Without breaking eye contact, he stopped stroking himself long enough to position himself over Bucky’s cock and slowly, slowly ease himself on.

It was the most remarkable feeling, entering him like that. He’d been having sex with girls since high school, which had always made him feel like quite the Valentino, but these last few months with Steve had taught him that there was a whole universe of pleasure he’d never even imagined existed. He’d once asked Steve where he learned how to do all this stuff, and he’d just winked and said, “Art school.”

“You make it sound like a whorehouse.”

“Hardly,” he’d laughed. “But the crowd there’s a little friendlier to guys like us.”

He wondered, with irrational jealousy, who at Steve’s art school had taught him this—because it was fucking _fantastic_.

Once Bucky was all the way in, Steve grinned big and began to rock his hips and stroke himself again. “You can move, too,” he murmured, and Bucky dug his heels into the mattress and began to rock with him, just gentle little ellipses at first, until he saw a fine sheen of sweat break out across Steve’s chest and his mouth fall open with catching little breaths. His eyelids drifted down but didn’t close entirely, and Bucky held his half-mast gaze as he thrusted harder, tonguing and biting his own lip for stimulation as Steve took his free hand and, with more coordination than Bucky could ever muster for himself under the circumstances, thumbed and pinched Bucky’s left nipple without breaking the rhythm of his strokes.

“Oh God, Stevie,” Bucky blurted out, and Steve grinned and shifted so he could ride him harder, and the squelch and slap of their bodies was so goddamned erotic, Bucky could hardly breathe. Waves of pleasure were rushing over him and dragging him under further and further until he couldn’t hold his breath anymore; he gasped and the breath carried his voice along with it, a kind of grunting whine that made Steve moan in reply.

They moved faster and harder until Bucky could no longer remember how to move and the room blacked out. He was vaguely aware that Steve had made noise, that he had shifted his weight and now was collapsed against Bucky’s chest, his ribs fluttering as he struggled to catch his breath.

Later, Bucky opened the window to admit the cool September breeze and Steve poured them each a few swallows of whiskey and they toasted each other in bed as they snuggled and dropped little kisses on each other’s ears and shoulders, sated and blissful but not ready to stop touching each other yet.

“I could get used to this,” Steve said, fluttering his eyelids in a mock swoon and resting his head on Bucky’s shoulder.

Bucky didn’t answer, not wanting to ruin the moment by asking what was supposed to happen when they did get used to it. Steve’s lack of living family was liberating in that regard—he didn’t have anyone who cared about whether he ever got married or not. Bucky, on the other hand…

Liked girls fine.

Just not the way he liked Steve.

But there was no fixing it, no way they could have what Steve wanted—not as long as Bucky’s parents were alive, anyway. He gathered Steve in his arms and cradled him against his chest. “You’re something else, Rogers,” he said softly, kissing the top of his head.

“So are you, you know?” Steve said, serious now. “I’ve been sweet on you since, God, I don’t know. Feels like all my whole life.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Bucky said softly.

“Like what?”

“Like we could get married or something.”

“We should go to France,” Steve said. “A lot of artists do. I could paint and you could write stories for the international papers and the French wouldn’t give a damn whether we had one bed or two.”

“France is at war, Stevie.”

“They they’ll definitely be too busy to pay attention to us.”

Bucky laughed softly. “Right. And when have you ever in your life gotten that close to a fight without throwing a punch?” he asked. “You’d be begging de Gaulle to give you a gun before the first week was out.”

“You’ll just have to distract me, then.”

Bucky squeezed him tighter and kissed the top of his head again. “All right,” he said. “France it is.”

*****************************

He’s startled awake by bright lights and a recording of reveille over a speaker mounted somewhere in the ceiling.

“Wakey, wakey, Sgt. Barnes,” says a new man rapping lightly on the plexiglass. He’s wearing the same navy uniform Typewriter and Apple were—not Army, then, but SHIELD. He’s got a cattle prod like everyone else. They must not want bullets down here. “It’s 0600 Eastern Daylight Time on Saturday, August 24, and I’m putting your breakfast and your antibiotic in the drawer. The doctors have you on soft foods today. If you can keep that down, they’ll let you chew tomorrow. The doctor has requested that I ask if you are feeling any pain from your operation. Are you feeling any pain?”

He rolls and stretches his shoulder, trying not to wince as he does. It still hurts like a bitch, but it hurts less than yesterday, and he wants to keep his head clear. “No, sir.”

“Very well,” Breakfast says briskly, placing the tray in the drawer. “You have until 0630 to eat and return your dishes. When you return your dishes, we’ll pass you a toothbrush, comb, safety razor, and a change of clothes. You will have 30 minutes to wash and change, and then you will return said toothbrush, comb, and safety razor, in addition to everything you are wearing now. If you fail to return any of the items we give you, you will be sorry. If your used paper napkin is missing, you will be sorry. If the drawstring from your pants is missing, you will be sorry. If the blade has been removed from your razor, you will be sorry. If so much as a tooth is missing from your comb, you will be sorry. Is that clear?”

“Crystal.”

“Excellent,” he says. “Bon appetit.”

Breakfast is oatmeal, scrambled eggs, and applesauce, with a cup of milk and a lukewarm cup of tea. There is a paper pouch of salt for the eggs and a pat of margarine for the oats and a packet of ketchup for no reason he can discern. It’s all bland and a bit slimy, but after five days without solid food, he’s starving, so he wolfs it down anyway.

A buzzer sounds when mealtime ends. Breakfast appears at the drawer seeming out of nowhere, evidently disappointed to see that Bucky has already placed his empty dishes in the chamber and is waiting at attention for his shower things.

The first thing he does is inspect the bathroom for anything he could use as a weapon. (Just in case, he tells himself.) SHIELD’s been careful about caging anything that could be easily taken apart, like the shower head and the toilet tank and the pipe assembly below the sink basin, but he can cut a man’s throat with the filter from the shower drain, strike a man’s temple with the faucet taps, spin the soap in a sock until it’s got so much momentum it breaks a man’s nose.

For that matter, the bed’s just a foam pad on a platform—no springs to sharpen into a blade—but it can shield him from a flash bang, and the blanket seems thick enough to protect him from tear gas or a blade for a while. And he’s still got the Thermos from last night. They forgot to ask for it back.

Fucking amateurs.

He’s also still got one very good arm.

He unknots his sleeve and wonders how long they intend to leave him this way. Probably at least until after he’s been debriefed, once he’s proved his good faith, or his utility, or both.

Long enough that he’d better get used to seeing it, at any rate.

He stands in front of the polished steel mirror over the sink to undress. Just seeing the sleeve hanging empty is disorienting enough; but when he pulls the undershirt off, his breath falters.

He isn’t sure what he expected to see, exactly, but it wasn’t this: A lasso of angry red, corded scar tissue looping around his shoulder from the curve of his neck to his bottom rib, extending almost to his left nipple in the front and the left side of his spine in the back. This was where they’d excised the support plates; the newly exposed skin is mottled and raw, crusty with a few still-healing scabs and angry with inflammation.

And then—he just ends there. There’s no arm, barely even a shoulder—just an irregular lump of tissue and bone about the size of an apple at the end of his collarbone that’s bisected by a thick curving scar like a grotesque smile.

He finds himself wondering whose body this is, this poor sonofabitch in the mirror who’s been skinned and butchered like a hog. He turns to the side to get a better look at the stump and then cups his fingers around it, as though touching it and seeing himself touch it will somehow force his brain to accept the mutilation for what it is. To accept his body for what it is.

“Shit,” he hears himself say aloud, though he’s not sure if he’s said it in English or Russian.

His chest feels like a black hole has opened inside it, somewhere beneath his lungs, and the rest of him is slowly being dragged down into it. He forces himself to breathe; pinches himself hard on his right thigh to keep his panic from swallowing him whole. 

“Less thinking, more doing, Barnes,” he mutters to himself, and turns on the shower.

The water is surprisingly hot and plentiful, and he lets it pound into the tender, bruised muscles and bones of his back. The physical act of scrubbing seems to remind him that he’s still got three-quarters of a body that’s already twice as strong as a normal man. That means he’s still operating at 150 percent, and even though it’s less than before, it’s still more than most.

Not that it had saved him in Siberia.

_You’re not in Siberia, anymore, Dorothy._

He works the worst of the tangles out of his hair with his fingers and finishes the job with the comb. It’s painful and tedious and takes so long that he doesn’t have time to shave before the buzzer rings to signal that his time is up. He manages to get his underwear and pants on before the second warning sounds, then hastily wraps all his dirty things up into his old undershirt and carries the bundle to the drawer just in time to avoid the third.

Breakfast is waiting on the other side of the drawer, and Bucky takes cruel pleasure at watching his annoyance turn to revulsion at the sight of his scars. That’s useful. His emotional reaction means Bucky can manipulate him if he needs to.

“You might want to put on a shirt,” he stammers. “You’ve got company.”

“I’m a little shorthanded here,” Bucky says mildly, gesturing at his left shoulder to twist the knife, and little fucker pales. “Be glad I didn’t come out here naked.”

“Please finish getting dressed, Sergeant Barnes. We have a long day ahead of us,” says a man with a British accent gliding into view in an electric wheelchair. Mid-thirties by the look of him, and obviously civilian, even without the wheels—his hair’s too long and he’s wearing a gray sportcoat and knitted tie, looking for all the world like a professor about to lecture him for turning in his term paper late.

“Who are you?” Bucky asks.

“My name is Charles Xavier. I’m a doctor.”

Bucky instinctively steps back from the plexiglass, heart pounding irrationally. “You the one who took my arm?”

“No. I had nothing to do with that barbaric decision,” Xavier says darkly, glaring at the guards.

“Then what do you want?”

“Think of me as a bomb disposal specialist,” he says. “I’m going to help you defuse that activation sequence in your head.”

“How?” Bucky asks, skeptical.

“I’m a telepath,” Xavier says, and Bucky laughs.

“Bullshit.”

“May I show you? It won’t hurt.”

“I think we can both stop pretending that I’m allowed to say no.”

“You are,” Xavier said forcefully. “I told SHIELD I wouldn’t do this unless it was your choice.”

“And if I choose not to?”

“Well, the U.S. government isn’t eager to let the KGB activate you again, so I expect you’ll have to remain here,” Xavier says.

Bucky snorts. “Yeah, some choice.”

Xavier shrugs. “It’s the only one I can offer you, I’m afraid.”

“Fine.”

Xavier raises his left hand and presses his forefinger and middle finger to his temple, and without opening his mouth, says, _Hello, Sergeant_.

Bucky flinches and stumbles back and nearly falls. “Get out,” he barks, and suddenly he feels a tiny shift in the pressure inside his head, and he knows Xavier’s gone.

“Did you feel that at the end?”

Bucky nods again.

“Remember that feeling. You didn’t notice it at first because you were paying attention to my words, but it’s always there, even if I’m not speaking. That’s how you’ll know I’m in your head,” he says, his voice gentle, as though soothing a panicked animal. “I will never enter your mind without permission. I will exit the instant you ask me to. The work before us will be painful, and for that I’m sorry, but I will do none of it without your consent. Can you agree to those terms?” 

“If you remove the words, they’ll let me go?”

“I don’t know if they’ll do that,” Xavier says apologetically, and Bucky can tell he’s telling the truth. “But I believe they will at least take you somewhere more salutary. This is no place for you, Sergeant.”

Bucky laughs bitterly. “I think we both know I belong somewhere a lot worse.”

A pained look flickers across Xavier’s face. “I’m offering you a chance to break HYDRA’s chains, Sergeant Barnes. Will you take it?”

The last thing Bucky wants is anyone else rummaging around in his mind, but Xavier wasn’t wrong: The word sequence _is_ a bomb inside his brain, and he’d rather kill himself than let anyone set it off again. He reaches up and rubs his thumb along the rough margin of his scar near his collarbone, then drops his hand and curls it into a fist. “All right,” he says, meeting Xavier’s eyes. “I’ll try.”

*****************************

Bucky is shackled and escorted down a long blank hallway to a cinderblock interview room furnished with a table and two chairs. There’s a large pane of one-way glass mounted into the wall behind the table and a thick steel anchor chain riveted to the opposite wall.

There’s a brief, tense exchange between Xavier and the guards about locking the chain to Bucky’s shackles, but Xavier prevails, and not only does Bucky remain unchained, they remove his shackle harness altogether and bring them some tea for good measure.

“You made them do that,” Bucky says after they close the door.

Xavier shrugs. “I didn’t make the same agreement with them that I made with you.”

“You’re a wily sonofabitch, aren’t you?”

“Just a frequently underestimated one, I’m afraid,” Xavier says.

“You always been like this?”

“Like what? Telepathic, disabled, or a wily sonofabitch?”

Bucky shrugs.

“I came into my telepathy at age nine. My spine was damaged five years ago. With apologies to my dear mother, I’m afraid I’ve been rather a sonofabitch since birth.” He gestures toward the table and Bucky drags one of the chairs away from the table so Xavier can sit there. He takes the seat opposite.

“Thank you,” Xavier says, positioning himself at the table. He pours the tea and pushes one of the mugs across the table.

Bucky takes a sip of tea. It’s strong and hot and sweet, and it reminds him of something nice he can’t quite place.

He notices Xavier watching him and puts the mug back down on the table.

“So you, what, work as a human lie detector for the government or something?”

“I am consulting on your case. I run a school for children with extraordinary mutations,” Xavier says, though his face turns dark. “Or rather, I did, before the Army conscripted all my instructors for the war in Vietnam.”

“They always find a way to make you fight.”

“Indeed.”

“That why you’re doing this? So they can make me fight, too?”

“No,” Xavier says. “I’m doing this so you can choose not to. You have very persuasive friends at SHIELD, you know. Friends who believe in you. Friends who want better for you.”

Bucky gives him a bitter laugh. “I forgot how naïve Americans can be.”

“I think we both know Steve Rogers would be at the top of that list if he could.”

That shakes him out of his black mood. “They find him yet?” Bucky asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Am I ever going to get to find out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, then, what the fuck _do_ you know?” Bucky asks irritably.

Xavier gives him a hard look. “I know that if he _is _alive, they won’t even consider letting you see him again until we get those words out of your head.”

Bucky sighs and wearily rubs his face. “So how does this work?” he asks.

“The activation sequence is, in its simplest form, classical conditioning. You told Deputy Director Carter that HYDRA conditioned you to associate each word with certain experiences—but I believe what they’ve actually done is conditioned you to associate the words with your _emotional responses_ to these experiences, such as confusion, fear, despair, and so forth,” Xavier explains. “These responses are fixed, like a broken bone that’s healed up the wrong way. You cannot will them away any more than you can will a crooked bone to straighten on its own. The only way to fix it is to build a stronger association with the opposite feeling,” Xavier says.

“Doesn’t sound so bad.”

Xavier splays his hands in a cautionary gesture. “In order to re-set the bones, I have to break them again,” he says. “I’m afraid this is going to hurt.”

Bucky takes another sip of the sweet, strong tea. It was before the war, he thinks, this memory—before sugar was rationed, back when he could take sweetness for granted. Back when he had Steve.

He finishes his tea and squares his shoulders. “Let’s get it over with, then.”

*****************************

They’ll work out of order, Xavier decides, alternating the easier words with the harder ones to make sure Bucky doesn’t break before they’re done.

“Are you ready?” Xavier asks.

Bucky grips the edge of the table and nods.

Xavier lifts his fingers to his temple and fixes his eyes on Bucky’s face. Bucky feels the odd underwater feeling in his head again as Xavier makes his way in.

“Печь,” he says, his accent perfect. Inside Bucky’s head, he adds: _Tell me what you feel._

Bucky swallows. His heart’s beating faster, the shadow of a memory swimming up to the surface like a hungry shark. He can’t get away from the shark because he’s been bound upside down from neck to ankle to a heavy pipe above a rusted utility sink in a dank basement that reeks of dead mice and mold.

His head is in the basin and the water is running and the water is rising, slowly but steadily, up past his eyes, and the strap around his neck is loose enough that he can breathe but he can’t lift it up, can’t buy himself a few extra seconds, and the water is beginning to breach over his nostrils now, the water fills his nose and floods his sinuses and begins to bubble back into his throat as he simultaneously to breathe through his mouth without aspirating the water coming in through his nose, and it’s not working, he doesn’t know the trick to it, and the first time he coughs it’s a mistake because the cough forces something open in the back of his throat, something that admits so much water into his mouth he has to spit it out.

But it’s futile because the water has reached his top lip, and he strains against the neck strap as much as he can, pressing so hard he gets dizzy, and he wonders if he could just strangle himself like this and get it over with. But he doesn’t have long to think about this because the water’s pouring into his mouth and he clamps his jaw shut, knowing it’s all over now, that he’ll only be able to hold his breath for so long, that his body will give him no choice but to breathe, that it will be water and not air, that he will drown.

_All right, Bucky, _Xavier says gently, and Bucky could swear he sounds shaken, even inside his head._ Can you tell me what you feel right now?_

_Helpless_, Bucky replies, blinking back tears.

_And what do you want to do more than anything to relieve that feeling?_

_Fight_, Bucky thinks instantly. _I want to hit someone._

_Tell me about your best fight, then—the one that made you feel the most powerful, even if you’re not proud of it now. You must be completely honest with yourself and with me for this to work. I will not judge you._

His mind roams. If you were measuring by heads cracked and ribs broken, any one of his Winter Soldier fights would take the cake—but looking back on them now, they all leave him feeling cold.

Because he wasn’t afraid of getting hurt, he realizes. He wasn’t even afraid of death. HYDRA had beat that out of him along with everything else—he was just a violent machine doing the job he had been programmed to do.

His memories of the war wouldn’t work for a different reason—as a sharpshooter, he rarely fought hand-to-hand, and when he did have the occasion to throw a punch, it usually had to do with too much whiskey and a bad hand of cards back at camp.

So he reaches further back, before the war, to Brooklyn. His mind flits around a vaguely familiar boxing ring—it’s always the same one, which makes him think he must have done some amateur prizefighting back in the day—but there’s just not enough for his memory to gain purchase on any particular matchup. So he tries to relax and open his mind further, rambling across pavement and cobblestones, alongside brownstone and red brick and plate glass windows and, for some reason, the grim garbage-strewn alleys that ran between them.

It was late at night but still hot as hell and the air was heavy with rain that just wouldn’t fall; the reek of the alley had thickened into a fat, greasy miasma of rotten fruit and spoiled milk and urine and cigarette butts and at least one dead animal. He doesn’t know why he was there until he realizes that he’d heard a noise, a scuffle, a familiar indignant voice, several others laughing with more menace than joy.

Something was very wrong.

He’d dropped whatever he was carrying and broken into a run, launching himself into the tangle of men—no, boys still, teenagers—punching and pushing his way through to the familiar voice at the center of it.

And there, crumpled on the pavement, was a broken blond pile of torn fabric and bloody skin, one fragile arm still swinging, his chest heaving with uncaught breaths and grunting faintly with each one.

Something snapped and Bucky roared. He grabbed the shirt of the first boy he could reach, yanking him in close and punching him in the nuts so hard he screamed. Bucky pushed him away and the rest of the boys were starting to back off, but he didn’t care. He grabbed the next boy and headbutted him in the face, crushing his nose with a sickening crunch before slugging him hard in the solar plexus, winding him so badly he slumped to the ground. The third one had given up; he was just trying to help the first boy get back up so he could leave, but Bucky dragged him off and shoved him against the wall so hard he heard a crack and blood started to pour down the back of the boy’s neck. It was nothing like the ring—those boys were going to kill Steve and all Bucky could do was hit and hit and hit and hit until there was no one left in the alley to hit anymore.

He didn’t remember the boys leaving, just that he was suddenly alone, with Steve lying much too still on the ground.

“Stevie, it’s me,” Bucky said, dropping to the ground next to him. “What happened?”

A bruised blue eye cracked open and Steve turned to spit out a bloody tooth. “They were hassling Mr. Rosenberg again.”

Bucky sighed and helped him sit up. “And what made you think you could win against three guys twice your size?”

Steve shrugged and leaned heavily into Bucky’s shoulder. “Ain’t always about winning, Buck,” he said, then turned to spit more blood. “It’s about standing up for what’s right.”

“Yeah, well, if you’re not careful, the next person you’re gonna be standing in front of is St. Peter,” Bucky said, helping him up. “Can you walk?”

“I’m fine,” Steve said, wriggling out of Bucky’s grasp. He took two limping steps, then reached for a nearby trash can and leaned on it, breathing heavily.

“The hell you are,” Bucky said, hooking his arm around Steve’s back to hold him up. “Come on, I’ve got you.”

_You did that a lot, didn’t you? Stand up for him like that._

_Yeah, I guess so._

_It felt good to do that. It was the right thing to do._

_He was my best friend._

_I can read your mind, Sergeant. I know he was quite a bit more than that to you._

_That’s none of your business._

_You should never be ashamed of fighting for the people you love. What did it feel like to save his life that night?_

_Like I’d just saved the world._

The pressure in Bucky’s head eases and Xavier lets his hand drop into his lap. “All right. I’m going to say the word again, and you’re going to think about that incident and nothing else. I want you to pay attention to every detail you can—the clothes you were wearing, the kind of moon that was out that night, the way those boys’ flesh felt beneath your hand when you hit them. Can you do that for me?”

Bucky nods.

Xavier raises his hand to his temple again. “Печь.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Bucky tackles a memory he can't even bring himself to recall, and Xavier gives him a fresh reason to hope.


	6. The Void Stares Back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Steve’s alive,” he says, hope ballooning painfully beneath his ribs as he speaks.
> 
> “I didn’t say that.”
> 
> “Didn’t have to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Featuring more art by Krycekasks!

“Sit still, wouldya?” Steve complained, his voice still gravelly from his latest bout of flu, and gave Bucky a peevish glare around the side of the drawing pad. He was standing in front of the easel, while Bucky was, to his infinite regret on such a cold day, sitting in a blanket-draped kitchen chair in a weak afternoon sunbeam wearing nothing but a pair of thick wool socks to protect his feet from the icy floor. On the radio by the window, to add insult to injury, a big band was playing something tropical and sultry, cruelly reminding them that summer was still seven months away.

“Jesus Christ, I’m freezing, Stevie,” Bucky complained, rubbing his hands hard on this thighs and arms to restore circulation to his goose-pimpled skin. “Do I really have to be naked for this? I’m pretty sure my balls’ve crawled halfway up into my stomach by now.”

“It’s for my figure drawing class, so yeah,” Steve said grumpily. “I’ve got to make these sketches up if I’m gonna pass and you said you’d help me.”

“I know,” Bucky said, his voice softening. “I’m sorry. I’m just cold, is all.”

“Stay there,” Steve sighed, setting his charcoal down and dusting his fingers off on the filthy overalls he wore to paint in. He went into the kitchen and banged around for a few minutes until Bucky heard the kettle sing.

When Steve emerged from the kitchen, he was carrying their largest mug, steam curling from the top. “Here,” he said, handing Bucky the tea. “Warm up.”

It was strong and hot and practically gritty with sugar—just the way he never admitted to liking it. He wasn’t a kid and he wasn’t a girl and he figured he ought to have outgrown his sweet tooth by now, but he never had.

Bucky finished the tea in three long swallows that burned his throat but did the job, then handed the mug back to Steve.

Steve took the mug and dropped a kiss on the top of Bucky’s head and then Bucky grabbed his arm and pulled him into his lap.

“Mmm,” Bucky said, kissing him hard. “Now I’m warming up.”

“I gotta finish the drawing, Buck,” Steve protested, laughing. “I’m gonna lose the daylight by 4.”

“We got time,” Bucky said between little kisses as he fumbled with the straps of Steve’s overalls.

Steve grinned and began working on his buttons as Bucky pulled the bib down to Steve’s hips and slid his hands up beneath the paint-spattered flannel shirt. Steve had lost too much weight when he was sick—his ribs still stuck out and Bucky could almost span his waist with his hands. He instinctively wrapped his arms protectively around Steve’s back, pulling him in closer so he could nuzzle a little against his neck. He bit down gently and flicked his tongue against Steve’s skin, eliciting a low rumble of pleasure in his chest.

“Gonna leave my mark on you,” Bucky said slyly, sealing his lips against his skin and sucking.

“Wait, Buck—” Steve said, jerking up and turning his head toward the window.

“No one can see us, Stevie.”

“No, listen,” Steve said, and Bucky realized that the music on the radio had stopped and a faint, static-riddled news broadcast had cut in.

“Hello, NBC. Hello, NBC. This is KTU in Honolulu, Hawaii. I am speaking from the roof of the Advertiser Publishing Company Building. We have witnessed this morning the distant view a brief full battle of Pearl Harbor and the severe bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy planes, undoubtedly Japanese. The city of Honolulu has also been attacked and considerable damage done. This battle has been going on for nearly three hours. One of the bombs dropped within fifty feet of KTU’s tower. It is no joke. It is a real war.”

*****************************

It takes three brutal days to unmake Печь—three days of panicky near-drowning, of crushing the skulls of the Vinegar Hill bullies, of hauling Steve’s dead weight up from the filthy alley floor.

At night he drops into bed not long after dinner, chasing a precious few hours of sleep before the nightmares arrive, bearing twisted newsreels of the Winter Soldier’s worst exploits, of Lukin and his truncheon, of Zola and his needles. Afterward, he drags his blanket from the bed and curls up on the floor next to the door. He doesn’t sleep much, but at least it’s safer.

But he presses on, through семнадцать and pжавый and Доброкачественные and Возвращение домой and рассвет. He becomes more accustomed to the process but it never gets easier, so deeply has the torture branded him. He relives it all—the beatings and the burns and the hunger and the exhaustion and the humiliation and at the end of it, fear, always fear.

So he tries to focus on the good—on the sweetness of an egg cream after a movie and the giddy thrill of Steve’s hand in his beneath the ocean waves and the joy of the too-long hug they were able to steal at Ebbets when the Dodgers finally won the pennant and the bone-deep comfort of curling up next to him the night after Kreichsberg and discovering that their bodies, changed as they were, still fit together.

Sometimes he gets glimpses of his family, too, but there isn’t much—he knows they lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, that they’d lived on the first floor and rented out the rest, that there had always been a place set for Steve on Sundays because his mother felt sorry for him. He had flashes of back-alley stickball and too-small shoes and his dad’s pipe tobacco and Christmas oranges and the musty, lavender-talc scent of someone he thinks might have been his grandmother. His parents would be in their seventies, if they were still alive, and his sister, Rebecca, would be Peggy’s age, no doubt married with children of her own. He wants to miss them, he does, but he recalls so little of them that he can’t muster anything more than vague curiosity.

But Steve—he’s bright as the goddamned sun.

No one will tell him where Steve is, how Steve is—not even whether Steve still _is_ at all. The uncertainty is worse than grief.

Желаниe, Девять, Один. They’re well into September by now, and he embraces the changeless routine of his days to offset his anxiety about Steve’s fate. The anxiety is a persistent loop: _Steve’s dead. Steve’s alive but he was captured by the Soviets. Steve’s alive but he doesn’t know I am, too. Steve’s alive but he doesn’t want to see me. Steve’s dead. Steve’s alive but he was captured by the Soviets. Steve’s alive but he doesn’t know I am, too. Steve’s alive but he doesn’t want to see me. Steve’s dead. Steve’s alive but he was captured by the Soviets. Steve’s alive but he doesn’t know I am, too. Steve’s alive but he doesn’t want to see me…_

But he wakes at six and Xavier arrives at eight and lunch is at noon and the tea is always sweet and hot and Xavier leaves at five and dinner is at six and lights out is at nine. He’d never been much of a reader before, but he’s allowed to have paperback books, so he passes the long evening hours with Westerns and detective stories—books that remind him of the movies he loved to watch before the war.

No one will tell Bucky if he’s been charged with a crime, if he’s been tried and convicted _in absentia_, if he’s going to remain a prisoner for the rest of his life. No one will tell Bucky if anyone in his family is still alive, if they know _he’s_ alive, if they know he’s here, if anyone knows he’s here.

The only reassurance he has is the knowledge that the U.S. government would never go through the trouble—which is to say, the expense—of cleaning out his head if they intended to execute him in the end.

*****************************

They reach the final, hardest word on the last day of September. They’d tried to knock it out earlier, to put the worst behind him as soon as they could, but even with Xavier’s help he flinched away from it so badly that they could barely come near it.

But now he has no choice.

He sits across the table from Xavier—they feel like old friends now—and invites him into his mind.

“грузовой вагон,” Xavier says.

Bucky grips the table so hard, he can feel the bones in his fingers beginning to dislocate. His heart is hammering and his pulse is fast and his mouth is dry and he can feel a fine mist of sweat prickling up over his skin.

Even now, his mind skirts the margins of the memory, only allowing him glimpses from the corner of his eye, from between the fingers covering his face. At first he’d tried to keep count of how many times it happened, tried to marshal some sense of control by quantifying it, by stepping outside of himself and analyzing it like an intelligence briefing: how many times he cried, how many times he begged, how many times he simply slipped into numb silence and offered himself to them. But eventually the crying and begging stopped, and fell so far into the past he could hardly remember them.

_Can you tell me how you feel right now?_

_Ashamed._

_And what do you want to do more than anything to relieve that feeling?_

_Die._

The pressure in his head wobbles as Charles swallows hard. _Why?_

_Because I stopped fighting. I gave it to them so they couldn’t keep taking it from me._

_You did that to survive. It was an extremely brave, difficult thing to do._

_I gave up._

_Sergeant, you exhibited the strongest will to live of anyone I’ve ever met. Why seek death now?_

_So I won’t have to feel it anymore._

_The assault or the shame?_

_Both. The shame. I don’t know._

_Why are you ashamed?_

_I told you. I stopped fighting._

_That’s not the real reason. _Xavier meets his gaze. _Sgt. Barnes, this is important. We cannot undo this if we don’t know what it is. Why are you ashamed?_

Bucky strikes the table and stands up so quickly he knocks the chair down. “Out,” he growls, pointing at the door. “I’m not doing this anymore.”

Xavier bites his lip for a moment, then nods as the pressure shifts in Bucky’s head. “We’ll take a break.”

“No,” Bucky says. “I mean don’t come back. I’m done.”

“But we’re so close. I know you don’t want to stay here for the rest of your life. Let me help you.”

“I don’t care!”

“Bucky, why are you here?” It’s the first time Xavier has called him by his first name, he realizes.

“Because I’m a Soviet assassin.”

“That’s why you’re in prison. Why did you let Peggy bring you in if you knew you’d be locked up?”

“You’ve been in my head for weeks. You know why,” Bucky says softly, glancing back at the one-way glass behind him. “Please don’t make me say it in front of them.”

Xavier nods and backs away from the table. “I know where we can talk.”

*****************************

The elevator seems to rise forever—at least, far enough that Bucky feels his ears pop on the way up.

After several minutes, they come to a stop and the door opens into a small, steel-clad room with a textured, rubberized floor and a heavy submarine hatch mounted into the wall. Rain slickers hang on hooks near the hatch and water pools between the ridges of the rubber floor, and the room’s got a faintly salty, fishy scent he recognizes instantly as sea air.

“You sure about this, doc?” the guard at the door asks.

“What’s he going to do? Escape?” Xavier asks lightly.

“If you say so,” the guard says reluctantly, but he spins the hatch wheel anyway to unseal it.

Bucky finds himself squinting against the daylight as a rush of cool, humid air spills into the chamber. He follows Xavier out onto a helicopter landing pad as seagulls call and dive all around them. Waves lap against the low barrier encircling the pad and occasionally break over, splashing the concrete.

They’re surrounded by water on all sides, literally—the entire prison must be underwater, Bucky realizes, save for this landing pad and the elevator connecting it to the complex below.

“Jesus,” Bucky says, looking around the pad. “Where the hell are we?”

Xavier points toward a dark smudge to the northwest and hands Bucky a pair of field glasses. “See for yourself.”

Bucky lifts the field glasses and scans the distant beach until he sees—

The Coney Island Parachute Drop. So far away it’s tiny, but he recognizes it all the same.

“Jesus Christ,” he breathes, because they’re in New York Bay. Almost where it met the Atlantic, true, but still a piece of home all the same.

“Hasn’t changed all that much, I reckon,” Xavier says.

Now that he knows where he is, he can scan more quickly along the boardwalk—he spots Nathan’s Hot Dogs, the Wonder Wheel, and the Cyclone right away. He thinks he sees the sideshow where the tiny premature babies lived in little glass bassinets and the arcade where he shot so many balloons with a pellet gun the proprietor wouldn’t let him come back. But mostly he remembers sunburns and sand, and the smell of seawater in Steve’s hair when they got back home.

Maybe it’s different or maybe it’s not, but it’s recognizably home and that’s all he really cares about. He can’t be more than 15 miles away from Steve’s shabby fifth-floor walkup in Vinegar Hill, with the squeaky floors and the squeaky bed and the rusty bathtub in the kitchen and the radiators that radiated less heat than a cup of coffee.

“Steve’s alive,” he says, hope ballooning painfully beneath his ribs as he speaks.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Didn’t have to,” Bucky says, handing the binoculars back, his hand shaking.

“We have to get that word out of your head, Bucky,” Xavier says gravely. “I need you to understand what the stakes are.”

“They’ll let me see him if we do?”

“I know they won’t if we don’t.”

Bucky swallows and nods. He takes one more glance around the landing pad to confirm that they’re still alone, then sits on the tarmac and draws his knees up to his chest, tucking his head in tight against them. The pressure shifts and Xavier is there.

_You can do this, Bucky. Let me see what hurts you so._

_You won’t understand._

_Bucky, I’m on your side. Nothing you show me can change that._

Bucky shakes his head and curls up even more tightly, covering his head with his arm.

_I’m a monster. They turned me into a monster._

_No they didn’t. Monstrous things were done to you—monstrous choices were forced upon you—and you did what you had to do to survive._

_But you don’t understand how fucked up I am. You don’t understand._

_Then make me understand, Bucky. Show me._

So Bucky does.

The shame floods through him like magma—slow and searing, burning through his nerves and charring his skin from the inside, just as it had the day his body betrayed him in the worst, most intimate way, not just once but again and again and again, till he began to anticipate it, till he began to welcome it.

That’s the part that he’ll never be able to explain, he thinks—the moment his mind broke beyond repair, the moment he accepted his torturers as lovers, the moment he chose to become the beast they wanted him to be. The moment he agreed to become one of them.

He’ll never be able to explain how easy it was, after that, to hurt or maim or kill. How easy it was to turn the hate, the disgust he felt for himself back onto his victims. How it turned his targets into insects he never thought twice about crushing, how it turned everyone else into animals to be managed, not humans to be reasoned with. How it forced him to build an unbreakable steel wall between his humanity and the life he’d chosen over death. How in order to live, he’d consigned his soul to prison forever.

Xavier’s struggling to keep his face neutral, but he’s pale and he’s clenching his jaw in a way that Bucky hasn’t seen before. _You experienced a physiological response._ _That doesn’t mean you wanted it._

_You don’t understand. I decided to want it. I chose to want it. I did want it._

_Maybe you did and maybe they just made you believe you did, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you survived. Do you understand me? You did what you had to do to survive. Even if it meant giving in. Even if it meant convincing yourself of things you knew were lies, even if it meant admitting truths about yourself you never wanted to know, even if it meant turning your back on everything you ever believed in. You survived._

Bucky shrugs and looks out to sea. He wonders how far he could swim with one arm, how far he could get before he got so tired he drowned. The question’s purely academic—what he wants hasn’t mattered since he shipped out for England.

_I don’t think that’s really what you want, is it?_

_I just don’t know if I’ve got enough good left inside me to overcome that._

_I think you do. You just thought of music just now. I heard it._

*****************************

Bucky taught Steve how to dance in his kitchen on a Thursday night in early November—before Steve caught the flu that almost killed him and before the war broke out and before the draft threatened to separate them forever. Bucky had brought over a bottle of whiskey for some reason and by 7 p.m. they were already half in the bag and their poker game long-forgotten. Steve had gone to the kitchen for more ice and Bucky had followed him, humming along to [Billie Holliday](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yakzL1Q88c), and embraced him from behind and kissed his ear.

Steve had laughed and Bucky caught his hand and twirled him into a close dance hold and began to shuffle to the music.

“Buck, I don’t know how—”

“Shh,” Bucky said, kissing Steve’s forehead. “You’re gonna love it. Just follow me.”

He slid his hand all the way around Steve’s back, holding him close against his body, and tucked his hand in against his heart. In so many ways he had depended on Steve to show him what to do and how to be when they were together—it felt nice to be able to do something for him in return. Bucky held him close, feeling the slim curve of Steve’s back against his right hand and the delicate curl of Steve’s fingers clasped tightly in his left, and breathing in the warm, sweet smell of Steve’s head against his shoulder as they turned in slow, lazy circles around the kitchen.

The apartment was bright and cozy, redolent of something sweet baking at the neighbor’s downstairs, with the warm buzz of whiskey softening their limbs and quickening their smiles for each other. Bucky sang along as they danced, or tried to, only catching every third word or so and making Steve laugh when he gave up and decided just to make them up.

As the song wound down, he twirled Steve in an easy spin before catching him in his arms and lowering him into a dip.

This was bliss, Bucky remembered thinking as he kissed Steve on the way up. This was what he wanted most in the world: A lifetime of this moment, this song, this dance, this kitchen, together forever.

*****************************

Ten long days later, Bucky is seized from his bed in the middle of the night without warning, a bag shoved over his head and shackles clamped to his ankles and wrist. He’s beaten and dragged to a dark, musty room that smells like metal, disinfectant, and snow. He’s panicking for real now, wondering how they got him all the way back to Siberia so quickly. He’s shoved into a familiar chair, leather straps buckled hard across his body and limbs, a rubber bit shoved roughly into his mouth. He’s struggling as best he can against straps, where he is treated with a dose of electroshock so strong the seizure dislocates his shoulder. A man he’s never seen before—a man whose first language is Russian, from the sound of him—stands before him in a Red Army uniform and reads the words from a leatherbound book embossed with a star.

“Go to hell,” Bucky spits, and suddenly the illusion shimmers and fades away.

He’s back in his cell, lying in his bed.

“Welcome back, Sergeant Barnes,” Xavier says, a gentle smile on his face. He closes his hand over Bucky’s shoulder and squeezes it.

“I’m going to fucking kill you,” Bucky growls.

“I’m truly sorry. The test had to be as realistic as possible.”

Bucky turns away from him and curls up with his back to Xavier and begins to cry from relief as it finally sinks in that he’s finally, finally free from the thousand-pound collar he’s been wearing around his neck all these years. He can bear anything, he realizes, as long as he doesn’t have to bear that anymore.

“Thank you,” he whispers.

“It is I who should thank you, Bucky,” Xavier says.

“Why?”

“For trusting me with your pain,” he says. “And trusting me with your heart.”

“Is he all right?”

Xavier’s quiet for a moment. “Yes,” he says finally. “He’s all right. He’s recovering in a secure facility. Deputy Director Carter and Mr. Stark have been with him the entire time.”

“Have you seen him? Is he all right?”

“All I know is that he’s expected to make a full recovery.”

“Thank God,” Bucky sighs, the exhalation of a breath he didn’t even realize he’d been holding, and rolls onto his back. And then again: “Thank God.”

“It wasn’t God who saved him, Bucky,” Xavier says. “It was you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we've reached the end of Part 2 (I don't know about y'all, but I just want to wrap Bucky up in the warmest, softest of hugs). 
> 
> In Part 3, we move on to Steve's POV as he recovers from his deep freeze and tries to reconcile with a world that's very different from the one he knew before.


	7. Life After Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve turns the photograph over, and there, older than he’d been when he died but much younger than he should have been if he’d lived, is Bucky, looking more tired than he had ever seen him before.

**PART 3: UPSTATE NEW YORK**  
**September, 1968  
** **(Steve)**

“You should marry Peggy,” Bucky said, handing the shared cigarette to Steve. “Otherwise everyone and their mother is going to be throwing their eligible daughters at you once you get home.”

They were sitting watch together near the Finnish-Russian border the night before their final push toward Kronas, huddling close for warmth because even the fire couldn’t warm them against the Arctic December cold. There was a big moon tonight, and the glow from the snow did pretty things to Bucky’s face, lighting his eyes and reddening his lips and catching silver in his hair, and Steve would much rather look at that than the ridgeline up ahead where they knew HYDRA’s forces lay.

“And what am I supposed to do? Sneak around with you when I’m supposed to be out playing golf?” Steve laughed softly. “Nah. I like her too much to do that to her.”

“You and Peg are two peas in a pod. If there’s anyone you could stand to settle down with, it’s her,” Bucky said. “All you gotta do is do her from behind, and then once she’s got babies, she’ll be too busy to want it, anyway.”

“Buck, stop,” Steve sighed. “You like girls too. I don’t. It’s not just a matter of turning her around. I don’t know how long we’ll be able to get away with this thing we’ve got, but you’re asking me to lie to her for the rest of my life, and I won’t do that.” He shook his head. “Besides, the serum means I can’t give her a baby even if I wanted to. She won’t like that.”

Bucky shrugged and looked away. “It’s just that—we’re strong, but we’re not immortal, you know? What happens if one of us goes down?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t be an idiot. You’ve got a big shield to hide behind, Stevie. I don’t,” Bucky said with patient seriousness. “We’ve still got a lot of war left to fight, and no guarantees we’re both gonna see the end of it. And if I get my ticket punched—”

“Buck, no.”

“_If I get my ticket punched_, I don’t want you to be alone,” Bucky said firmly. “And considering how famous your ugly mug is these days, it’s not going to be easy to pick up another fella without getting busted. You understand the risks, right?” Bucky slid his hand beneath the concealing folds of the blanket and closes it over Steve’s. “Peggy’s always going to be in your corner, Steve. You can trust her. Just promise me you’ll consider it, okay?”

Steve knocked his shoulder against Bucky’s. “Only if you promise to marry Lorraine if I’m the one who goes first.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “You know you’re the only man on Earth who thinks that’s a chore.”

“Bet she’ll never make you as happy as me, though.”

“No,” Bucky said clearing his throat. “Probably not.”

“I really wish it could be different, Buck,” Steve said, handing him back the cigarette, trying to shove his grief aside and save it for when he needed it. However much time they had left together, he was determined to savor every second of it.

Bucky leaned in close, and the weight of him against Steve’s shoulder was as tender as a kiss. “Me too, Stevie,” he said, his voice thick. He laced his fingers through Steve’s and held on as tight as he could, and Steve wished the moon would disappear so he could risk a kiss for real. “Me too.”

*****************************

Waking up didn’t happen in a straight line. He drifted in and out of awareness for a long time, or so it felt—distantly registering movement and voices, people touching him, possibly saying his name. Sometimes he had the energy to flutter his eyelids open for a hazy moment, to squeeze a hand with boneless fingers, to emit a low, hoarse grunt of acknowledgement. Mostly, though, he lingered in a kind of muddy half-consciousness, not quite drowning but not quite treading water, either.

But gradually his awareness began to sharpen. He began to identify certain smells—disinfectant, urine, aftershave, pipe tobacco—and recognize certain voices. There were at least two men and four women, he thought, though there might have been five. He was in a bed, a clean one, and he was no longer cold. God, he’d been so, so cold.

He began to keep his eyes open longer. He could register what he saw—a nurse, a window, a chair—but it took a while for him to draw the necessary conclusion that he had survived the Valkyrie crash somehow, that he was in a hospital. Even when that understanding dawned, it took a while longer for him to wonder what the hell actually happened to him.

He doesn’t remember the exact moment he learned that he’d been out of commission for 23 years—later, he would learn that they’d had to tell him at least a dozen times, because he kept forgetting every time he fell asleep.

But eventually he remembered. He knew that it was 1968, that the war had been won, that the Americans had intercepted Russian intelligence about his whereabouts, that the serum had kept him alive, that he was back in the United States, that he was expected to make a full, if slow, recovery.

These were facts he could recite, though they meant little when all he could see around him was a hospital room and, out the window, a broad field with a horse paddock and mountains in the distance. They were in Virginia, he recalled, somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley, a few hours away from Washington D.C.

The only truth he could feel was that Bucky was gone. Bucky was gone and Steve was still here and that realization was almost as painful as the loss itself. Everything made him think of the look on Bucky’s face as he realized the railing he was clinging to had broken, of the way Bucky had kept reaching for him long after he was too far away to catch, of how he had shouted, “No!” all the way down in disbelief. Everything reminded him that Bucky was gone.

But the first and last lessons his mother had ever taught him was that loss was survivable—she had survived the loss of her husband before Steve’s birth and Steve had survived the loss of her and he supposed he was doomed to survive the loss of Bucky, too. And one day he would no longer be too exhausted to wonder how, but not today. Not yet.

It was Peggy who made the passage of time become real. She was visibly older, yes, and her hair was shorter and her makeup was all wrong, but none of that really mattered because it was _her_ and she was _here_ and he’d wept almost as hard as she had when she appeared at his door. Her arm was in a sling—collateral damage from a recent mission in Prague, he learned—and she was wearing a red dress—not _the_ red dress, but that didn’t matter either—and suddenly he wished he’d thought to ask for something nicer than pajamas.

But the look on her face told him that it didn’t matter, either. Leaning heavily on the cane they’d given him to walk with, he heaved himself up from the bed so he could greet her standing up. She’d hurried across the room to meet him, to hug him hard, to kiss his cheek and rest her head against his chest and listen to his heart beat once more.

“You were late for our dance,” she scolded him, half-laughing, half-crying, and Steve wrapped his arms around her, and that felt comforting—more than he expected, considering that for him it had only been a few very fuzzy days since he’d seen her last—and so he bent down to kiss the top of her head, too.

She stepped back and he smiled and touched her face. Age hadn’t dimmed her beauty—rather, it had sharpened it somehow, cut through the sweetness and brought out something vibrant, something gloriously alive. She looked like a woman at the top of her game. “Look at you.”

“Bit the worse for wear, I’m afraid,” Peggy said, blushing uncharacteristically.

“No, Peg,” Steve said honestly, catching her hand. As he did, he noticed the tiny diamond solitaire and the plain gold band she wore on her ring finger, and he smiled as he ran his thumb across them. “Tell me everything.”

“All right,” she said. She touched his cheek and pushed his hair off his brow and then took his arm and helped him walk to the soft chairs across the room beneath the wide bay window.

They sat, and Peggy began to tell him the story of her life without him. She told him how she’d turned in her skirted uniform for good in favor of a set of Army greens and her leather jacket and put her foxhunting skills to good use as the Howlies’ new sharpshooter. How together, she and Dugan tried and mostly failed to fill Steve and Bucky’s shoes, but they kept going anyway, pushing through their grief to keep the mission alive.

She told him how after the war, she took Chester’s offer—strange to hear her call him by his first name now—to join SSR permanently, how she moved to New York and did her best to start over.

How she did start over, finally, in Los Angeles, and then with—she hesitated—Daniel. She took his hand when she spoke of him and he kissed it.

“It’s all right, Peg,” he said. “Is he good to you? Do you love him? Does he make you happy?”

She nodded. “Yes to all three. Very much so.”

“Then I’m happy,” he said, hoping she could not detect the wave of relief flooding through him. “You deserve love, Peg.”

“So do you,” she said, with an unreadable expression on her face.

“I’ve had it,” he said, squeezing her hand, trying not to tear up again, letting her think it had been her. “I’ll be all right, Peg. You’ll see.”

They spent the entire afternoon talking. He listened with rapt attention to Peggy’s exploits with SHIELD—hobnobbing with presidents and prime ministers and carrying out missions all around the world. He couldn’t help but smile; this was the life Peggy had always wanted and it delighted him to know she’d found it. The children hadn’t been part of the plan, admittedly, but they sounded like good kids and she clearly loved them, and that made Steve happy, too. And besides, she had the great good fortune to be married to a man with no expectation that she give up her career for any of them, and that made Steve happiest of all.

She stayed until Steve could no longer keep her eyes open, but she returned the next day, and the next day, and the next.

Howard came a few days later, and Phillips, too, though he didn’t stay long. After all, _someone_ had to run SHIELD while its deputy director and science director were playing high school reunion with the star quarterback.

“It’s good to see you, too, Colonel,” Steve said wryly as Phillips gathered his cane and stood with a faint groan. Christ, he was frail now.

“It’s ‘General’ now, Rogers,” he retorted. He paused in the doorway and rapped the jamb with his knuckles. “Glad to have you back, Rogers. We missed you.”

“He has, you know,” Howard said, resting his feet on the coffee table after Phillips was gone. “He took it hard when you went down.”

“I heard my funeral was nice, at least,” Steve said.

Howard swatted his arm. “Don’t joke about that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You _died_, Steve,” Howard said forcefully. “My good friend died 23 years ago, and I have been looking for your body ever since. It’s not a fucking joke.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Look, I’m not—” Howard shook his head and stood up, though he didn’t seem to have plans to go anywhere. He held his hands out to his side uncertainly. Time and marriage had softened Howard in an interesting way, Steve noticed. He was still brash and a bully, to be sure, but there was a degree of introspection that he hadn’t been there before. “Ah, hell. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

“It’s hard to see me again.”

“You’re goddamned right it’s hard to see you again!” Howard barked. He shoved his hands into his pockets and began to pace the room. “That funeral was real. Our lives without you were real. And now you just show up and—undo it all.”

“So, what, you wish I was still in the ice?”

“No! I just wish—” Howard took his hands out of his pockets and holds them out helplessly to the side. “May 17, 1946. The government had called off the search by then, so I bought my own icebreaker to keep it going. And on May 17, 1946, we accidentally drifted into Greenland’s territorial waters and passed directly over your position. And we missed you.” An expression of genuine, physical pain crossed his face. “I’ve been going over it and over it and over it in my mind—was there an equipment failure? Did we think the Valkyrie was a school of fish? Were we just asleep at the fucking wheel that day? How did we miss you? And I can’t answer that. I don’t know.”

Steve blinks away the memory of Bucky slipping just out of reach forever. “It’s not your fault, Howard.”

“That’s cute, you know,” Howard said, fishing a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and lighting one. “The way you think you’re the one who gets to forgive me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re not the one who’s had to live without you for 23 years, now, are you?”

“You mean Peggy?”

Howard threw his arms out in a vague gesture around the room. “I mean all of us.”

“Howard.”

“You think we didn’t need you all this time? How many people have died because Captain America wasn’t there to save them? Because Howard Stark, the smartest man in the United States, missed an airplane the size of a B-17 when he sailed right over it?”

“Howard. Stop.”

Howard swallowed. “We were friends, right?” he asked. “I didn’t imagine that—make the past go all rosy with the passage of time? We were friends.”

“We _are_ friends, Howard.”

“Okay,” Howard said, nodding. “All right. Good.”

“Howard?”

But Howard didn’t answer so much as let a small sob bubble up and burst with a breathy little sputter as he quickly looked away. He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and that was it—a moment later his face was smooth and his eyes clear again.

He walked back to Steve and held out his hand. “Come on,” he said. “I’m busting you out of here.”

*****************************

And that was how Steve came to recuperate at Howard’s sprawling stone-and-cedar vacation lodge perched on a small private lake high in the Adirondacks.

Howard flew Steve and Peggy there himself on his state-of-the-art private jet. Steve laughed when he saw it, kitted out like a whorehouse parlor in red velvet curtains and leather sofas, but less than half an hour into the journey—barely enough time for him to catch a glimpse of the Washington skyline from the air—he was grateful to have somewhere to sleep the rest of the way.

Howard’s butler, Jarvis, greeted them at the front door when they arrived, offering drinks. Peggy opted for tea and Howard went for a martini and Steve, feeling a bit rebellious against his doctors’ orders, asked for a beer. Howard gave them a ten-cent tour but it wasn’t a hard place to figure out: the living areas and Jarvis’ apartment were on the first floor and all the bedrooms were on the second. Howard took them upstairs in the elevator next to his office, an unexpectedly tactful way of pointing out to Steve that he could use that if he wasn’t up for stairs yet.

For a man without children, Howard had a lot of bedrooms—six, by Steve’s count—and somehow Jarvis had already managed to get their bags upstairs to all of them. Not that Steve had much—a few changes of pajamas and sweatsuits, plus the khakis and shirt he’d worn on the plane today—but Jarvis opened the closet to reveal a small but complete wardrobe already waiting for him.

“We had to guess at your size, Captain Rogers, but my wife, Ana, is available to make alterations if need be.”

“Thank you,” Steve said, but he wasn’t paying attention to the closet anymore.

Because there, at the foot of his bed, stood his Army trunk. There was no lock on it.

Jarvis followed his gaze and understood immediately. “Of course you’ll want to rest after your long journey. Dinner is at 7:30. Press the intercom button by the door if you need anything.”

Jarvis was polite enough to close the door on his way out, and Steve quickly locked it behind him. Then, balancing precariously with the cane, he knelt before the trunk and opened the lid.

And there, right on top of his clothes, next to his dopp kit and a bundle of rolled socks, was his notebook, and tucked neatly between the covers were the pages he’d cut out a quarter-century before. The pages that he always kept hidden deep beneath the false floor of his trunk, that he never, ever, ever took out unless he was alone. A freezing dread bloomed through him, twisting his stomach and gripping his heart with icy fists.

It meant that Peggy had seen his drawings, had already divined every secret he’d poured into it. That Peggy had probably known the truth about him—and Bucky—for a long, long time.

But she came back for him anyway. She knew, and she came back for him anyway. Even though she’d married, even though she’d moved on, she still thought he was worth saving.

Steve picked up the notebook and turned it over in his hands, then brought it up to his face and smelled the leather cover. It was musty now, and cracked, and a bit of water had bubbled most of the pages in the top corner, but it was still as he remembered it.

He held his breath and opened it.

The words were beside the point—all that mattered were the sketches. He sifted through them all, touching his fingers to each one in turn, as though a few lines of faded pencil on yellowed paper could ever replace the warm heavy satin of Bucky’s skin.

Finally, he turned to the last page. This drawing was to have been his pièce de résistance—his first full nude of Bucky. But he’d only begun it the night before Bucky died, a few quick gestures scribbled down from memory in stolen moments away from the men. There was a long, curving line of his back and another transecting it to mark his shoulders, a tilted oval to capture the adorably needy little tip of his head he used to do when he was trying to seduce Steve when he was small, and Bucky needed to lean down to catch his eye.

That was it—just three lines and yet he’d recognize Bucky anywhere from it. _How little we need of someone to love them_, he thought.

*****************************

A slow, uneventful month later, he’s still a prisoner, though no one calls him that, but he’s free to move around the property, and every morning Jarvis brings a cup of black coffee and a copy of the _New York Times_ up to his room while he’s in the shower. (Steve’s not sure he ever sleeps.)

Bit by bit he’s acquainted himself with modern technology—the coffee maker, the stereo, the intercom, the television, the mainframe computer in Howard’s basement lab that he can’t begin to understand. When Steve isn’t fiddling with this gadget or that, he’s reading the paper, walking the grounds to build up his strength, sketching the woods as they begin to turn from green to gold.

It’s peaceful out here, and pretty, and lonely in a good way. He gives up the cane, builds up more endurance, even ventures a few swims in the lake before the days turn cool, a few short jogs once they do. The mattress is too soft and the food is too rich and he can’t shake his guilt over having unlimited heat and hot water when boys in uniform are dying in the mud somewhere (there are always boys in uniform dying in the mud somewhere) and it’s a strange thing to have no choice about, but he makes the best of it.

His grief for Bucky grows and then mutates into a different quality of pain, an unpredictable, knife-like thing that snags his heart for no apparent reason, releasing a fresh gout of heartbreak that swamps him for hours. The stupidest things trigger it—the smell of burnt coffee, a song on the record player, a wrinkle in his sock—and the next thing he knows, his heart is twisting in his chest and his eyes are sharp with tears.

Some nights he dreams of Bucky—vivid, sexy, delicious—and it’s beautiful. Other nights, it isn’t—it’s screams and dirt and explosions, and those are the nights Steve wakes up shouting and crying to find Peggy sitting on the bed next to him, stroking his hair and murmuring nonsense words of comfort until he’s no longer afraid to try to sleep again.

Peggy is present but doesn’t crowd him. She takes over Howard’s office and spends her days there, working and taking phone calls. An aide comes every day to deliver new files and take away old ones, and occasionally Chester will take a helicopter up from New Jersey to deliver a briefing in person.

Sometimes he gets the sense that she’s actually avoiding him, though he hardly begrudges her that—it can’t be easy babysitting a former sweetheart while your family misses you at home. Sometimes he overhears her speaking to Daniel or her children on the kitchen telephone; they don’t know where she is or why, but it’s clear from her tone of voice that they’re used to that by now. Their conversations sound warm and loving and dotted with tiny familial intimacies that fill Steve with an emotion he can’t quite identify—a mix of jealousy, nostalgia, happiness, and relief all jumbled together.

At night, he and Peggy have dinner together, watch the news on television, and then set up a new film in the projector to watch. It’s oddly reassuring, watching the spectacle of _Cleopatra_ and the melodrama of _Breakfast at Tiffany_’s and the righteous anger of _To Kill a Mockingbird_, knowing that while colors and styles and slang might change, people don’t, not really. At the end of the day, there’s nothing in these movies he hasn’t seen before.

Howard’s given them war movies, too, but they don’t watch those—Steve’s got no interest at all in seeing what Hollywood does to the lives of good men who, to him, died just a few days or weeks or months before. Besides, he sees enough of that in his dreams.

More usefully, Howard’s also left him a library of newsreels. He learns about the atomic bombs and how awful the Japanese camps had been and the partition of Europe and the Cold War and the hot war in Korea and Sputnik and the war in Vietnam and the nukes in Cuba and the lynchings of blacks in Mississippi that reminded him horribly of things he’d seen during the war. He watches with rapt wonder as an American man is launched into space for the first time. He learns about the Beatniks and the mods and the hippies and the yippies and the Freedom Riders and the Black Panthers. He watches with great interest, though he doesn’t dare show it, a two-minute segment about the homosexual community in San Francisco.

He and Peggy never discuss the contents of his sketchbook, but one evening after dinner, Steve thanks her for keeping it and Peggy gives him a strange little smile and says, “Of course.” She takes his hand and squeezes it to let him know it’s all right, but Steve can tell from the odd look on her face that she both does and doesn’t want to talk about it.

In the end, she doesn’t talk about it.

By late September, it gets cold enough to light a fire in the living room, and Peggy puts on an old record they’d both liked during the war Steve gives her her dance. A promise was a promise.

_This is what bittersweet tastes like_, he thinks. His heart aches for Bucky with every step, and yet he’s glad to be with her, to be able to give her this, to finally sew the last stitch in the wound he’d left in her life. He would have married her, he thinks. He would have found a way to lie to her. He would have found a way to live with it.

A promise was a promise.

*****************************

On the afternoon of Steve’s 34th day out of the ice, he returns from his slow, meandering afternoon constitutional to find Peggy standing on the porch, waiting for him, a look of indecipherable concern plain on her face.

“What’s the matter?”

Peggy gestures toward the door. He follows her inside to the living room where there’s a thick cardboard-bound dossier bound in twine sitting on the coffee table. They sit side by side on the deep leather sofa, but neither one of them touch the file.

“It’s time for me to tell you something very important about the circumstances of your rescue,” Peggy says, taking his hand in hers. “And I must warn you that this is not going to make a lot of sense at first. I was against keeping this information from you from the beginning, but the doctors insisted that you needed peace and calm in order to heal.”

“Peg, what the hell is going on?”

“The Soviet asset who provided the intelligence that saved your life is someone you know very well. Someone you cared about and trusted.”

“Okay,” Steve says warily, wondering if it was one of the Howlies. Dernier, maybe—there had been rumors that some French Resistance cells were working with the Soviets.... “Who?”

Peggy winces and glances away before meeting his eyes again. “Darling, it was Bucky.”

He’s so stunned that he can barely process what she’s telling him, but by the time she finishes he understands—insofar as he can understand anything anymore—that while Steve was napping beneath the ice, the love of his life was enduring a hell on Earth he could not begin to imagine.

More facts without meaning, but facts all the same. Sharp, heavy ones, hooking hard into the tissues of his heart, dragging it down, down, down.

Then Peggy hands him the folder, touches his cheek, and leaves him alone with it.

Clipped to the inside front page is a photograph—Bucky’s mugshot from Vienna, Peggy tells him. Steve swallows and turns the photo over.

And there, older than he’d been when he died but much younger than he should have been if he’d lived, is Bucky, looking more tired than Steve had ever seen him before.

The dossier is concise and devastating. First there is a 9-page executive summary of Bucky’s life between his fall from the train and, as far as Steve can tell, last week. It tracks with what Peggy’s told him, and he skims it quickly.

Next are photos of his kills—27 murders, all of them clinical and precise, all of them clearly premeditated, all of them clearly executions. Most of his victims have been shot, but there is one car accident, one drowning, several cut throats, and three strangulations, two of which—Steve can see from the bruises—were done by hand. Each is accompanied by a forensic summary, and Steve feels his gorge rise as he realizes that at least six of the bodies showed signs of torture first.

In some cases there are surveillance photos—mostly of Bucky lurking in the shadows or walking up a flight of stairs or running down a hallway—giving Steve his first look at Bucky’s metal arm. It’s a cold, brutal thing, a weapon grotesquely masquerading as a limb, and he sees that on full display in the next batch of photos. The security camera has captured a reflection in a mirror of Bucky shoving a woman up against the opposite wall and strangling her with his metal hand. There is no question it’s him and there’s no question what he’s doing. Her eyes are wide with panic, she’s trying to fight back, and just enough of his head is turned that Steve can tell he has absolutely no expression on his face—no cruelty, no doubt, no disgust, no anger. It’s as if he’d been kidnapped from his own body and inhabited by a shark.

A strange, frozen sludge of horror mixed with grief pours through him, seizing his heartbeat and his breath so that he can’t seem to catch either.

Next is a long inventory of Bucky’s own torture—an excruciating catalog of human cruelty, each item more horrifying than the last. Steve cries when he sees that rape is on the list and he cries again when he sees that the list keeps on going for more than a page. On the final page is a front-and-back line diagram of an anonymous male body with all of Bucky’s scars marked on it. He’s covered in them—cuts, bullet holes, burns, surgical incisions—some in places that Steve can’t imagine how he got them.

Only the left arm of the diagram is untouched.

There’s a schematic of the robotic arm and an x-ray of his shoulder that reveals the steel attachments that stabilized it against his bones and the cybernetic wires that ran between his spine and his shoulder. He notices a thick white scar on the end of Bucky’s truncated humerus—a callus that formed on the bone after the amputation, caused by the pressure of his prosthesis, according to the doctor’s note. Steve can’t stop looking at it, can’t stop thinking of the saw that cut through the arm, the flap of skin and muscle folded and stitched over it, can’t explain why this, arguably the least of Bucky’s many injuries, is the one that seems to carry the weight of Steve’s grief for him.

The last page is a copy of a letter from a Doctor Charles Xavier to the directors of SHIELD and every other national security agency, the attorney general, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and the president.

_After six weeks of intensive telepathic therapy, I am confident that the prisoner, James Buchanan Barnes, has been truthful insofar as he is able to recall the details of his life. He shows clear evidence of prolonged torture and a degree of psychological coercion so severe that it would not be an overstatement to describe it as mind control. There is no question in my mind that the crimes he committed were not of his own free will._

_Though Sgt. Barnes expresses great shame and remorse for his actions while under Soviet control, I believe his guilt to be the natural sequelae of extraordinary trauma. Just as you or I might blame ourselves for failing to prevent the accidental death of a loved one, so Sgt. Barnes blames himself for not breaking his chains in time to save those 27 lives._

_Sgt. Barnes was a prisoner of war, plain and simple. Thus, it is my professional, legal, and moral duty to recommend that Sgt. Barnes be released from prison and moved to a more salutary environment in the hopes that he may begin to heal from his trauma and regain some measure of stability through the reestablishment of relationships with his surviving loved ones._

Steve buries his face in his hands and weeps. He hadn’t noticed Peggy’s return, but she’s at his side in an instant, her arms around him and holding him close, rocking him and soothing him like a frightened baby in the night. He’s too overwhelmed and too relieved to care about his dignity—he cries and Peggy lets him, stroking his hair and murmuring words of comfort in his ear.

"You should have told me," he says finally, quietly, too spent to shout at her. 

"And you expect me to believe you would have remained here to recover like you needed to, or that he would have stuck around long enough to be deprogrammed?" she asks sharply. "You'd have killed yourself trying to get to him, and we would have killed him if he tried to get to you before we could be sure HYDRA couldn't turn him again, and then we'd have lost you both twice, and I couldn't allow that. I couldn't." 

"I have to see him." 

“Steve, what he went through—” Peggy shakes her head. “I have to warn you that happened to him changed him. Profoundly. We broke HYDRA's programming, yes, but we can't undo what was done to him, or his memories of what he did. He'll carry that with him for the rest of his life. You may never—" she closes her eyes briefly, and if Steve had any hope that she had not fully understood the true nature of their relationship, it vanished here. "—have what you had before.”

“But he’s still Bucky, isn’t he?” Steve asks, not that it would matter. No matter how little of Bucky remains in that body, Steve will try to find it.

Peggy hands him something else—a Soviet school composition book that she’d brought back into the room with her. “You can see for yourself,” she says. “He wanted you to have this.”

It takes less than an hour to read, cover to cover. There are parts where Steve’s Russian isn’t up to the task, and other parts that are so vague or muddled he can’t figure out what Bucky was trying to recall, but there’s enough that Steve recognizes—that only _Steve_ could recognize—

_Just don’t do anything stupid till I get back._

_How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you._

He closes the book, looks Peggy in the eye, and nods. She nods back and goes to Howard’s office. He hears her speak softly for a few minutes, then she returns, smoothing her skirt a bit anxiously.

“Thank you, Peg,” Steve says softly.

“I need you to prepare yourself, Steve,” Peggy says, sitting next to him and taking his hand. “He’s been very badly hurt, both in body and soul. He still has a very, very long road ahead of him, and so do you.”

Steve swallows. “I’m willing to do whatever it takes,” he says forcefully. “For as long as it takes.”

“I know you are, darling,” she says, squeezing his hand. “I wish you well, Steve. Truly.”

Steve kisses her temple. “Thank you, Peg. That means a lot, coming from you.” And then, before she can respond, he adds: “I’m sorry, by the way.”

She turns to look at him questioningly. “For what?”

“I’m sorry you had to find out the way you did.”

Peggy opens her mouth as if to speak, then closes it again and nods once, to herself.

“What?” Steve prompts. “Out with it.”

“Would you ever have told me about him, if things had gone differently?”

Steve looks at Bucky’s mugshot again and presses his fingers to it. “If things had gone differently, I wouldn’t have had to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Steve and Bucky reunite.


	8. ‘Till the End of the Line

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You think you can save me but you can’t, Stevie,” Bucky says wearily. “You can’t.”
> 
> “When has that ever stopped me from trying?”

Two days after they staggered back into Azzano, the Kreischberg survivors were given—ordered by the Army psychiatrists, actually—a whole week of R&R at a military rest center on the Adriatic Sea.

Though “rest center” turned out to be quite the understatement, because when they arrived that night they discovered that the Army had commandeered an entire goddamned health spa right there on the beach, complete with a grand marble staircase and a brocade-draped dining room dripping with chandeliers.

True, there were only four hours of electricity at night and the pool had been drained, but they got real beds and three hot meals a day and, thank Christ, not just beer but liquor, too.

They men were billeted two to a room. They offered Steve a single—no one could decide if Captain America was really an officer or not but decided to err on the side of deference—but he refused, saying that if a double was good enough for the men he’d rescued, it was good enough for him._ I’ll just bunk with my old pal Barnes, _he’d said. _It’ll be like when we were kids back in Brooklyn._

The morale officers running the center had warily indulged Steve’s egalitarianism, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to assign a captain to an ordinary double, which is how he and Bucky ended up sharing a top-floor corner suite with a balcony overlooking the sea.

But that was all right, Steve reasoned, because after whatever Bucky had been through—his silence on the subject told Steve far more than Dugan’s briefing ever could have—he deserved a little TLC.

Once the adrenaline of their escape wore off, Bucky had slipped into a grim, haunted silence that he only broke long enough to give Steve advice or give the men orders. He allowed Steve to sit with him at meals but almost never spoke, and he allowed Steve to lay out his bedroll beside him at night but always slept with his back turned. Even his nightmares were silent—just a few minutes of gasping and thrashing until he woke himself up, breathless and sweaty and pale. When Steve reached over to touch his arm, Bucky flinched and batted it away.

There had been a brief moment of hope, when they crossed the Winter line into Allied territory, when Bucky had half-smiled at Steve’s quip about sticking together to the end of the line, but it had evaporated almost as quickly as it came.

Back at Azzano, the tension persisted: Bucky neither avoided Steve nor invited him into his presence. Mostly he just dropped into a kind of distant orbit, content to simply keep Steve in sight but unable or unwilling to seek out more.

Steve had precious little experience with battle fatigue, but he knew a thing or two about feeling low, and he knew what Bucky needed most was time and space to find his way back to himself. So he tried not to take it too personally when Bucky simply gave the suite an expressionless once-over before taking his bag to the second bedroom and shutting the door.

Bucky didn’t answer when Steve told him it was time for dinner, so Steve went alone and sat with Dugan and Falsworth, and then Jones, Morita, and Dernier joined them by silent agreement as they had every evening since leaving Kreischberg.

They were protective of Bucky, these men, and he knew full well Bucky was the only reason they had followed the War Department’s vaudeville hero through nearly 600 miles of Nazi-occupied territory in the first place. They weren’t eating dinner with Steve because they liked him—they did it because they were still feeling him out, trying to decide whether they trusted Steve enough to put their lives in his hands.

And Steve wanted to prove Bucky right, prove to them that he was worth it, that if they’d just give him a chance, he’d show them he could fight as well as anyone. Mostly that meant not trying to impress them by pretending to know what he was doing. Instead, he listened, asked questions, accepted their ribbing with a healthy laugh at himself whenever he revealed his abject ignorance about this or that aspect of war.

They seemed to appreciate that and they seemed to appreciate even more when Steve loaded up a second plate of food to take back up to the room for Bucky, as well as pulling rank to requisition an entire bottle of whiskey to go along with it.

This time, Bucky answered the door when Steve knocked. He was wearing just his t-shirt and boxers and a crease from the pillowcase crossing his face told Steve that he’d been sleeping. There was an angrily stitched gash healing across his right shin and his left knee was yellow and green with the remains of a sprain. Even with that, he looked better than he should have, under the circumstances—while the rest of the men were half-starved wraiths, Bucky looked like he weighed more than he did the day he shipped out.

Whatever Zola’s serum had been made of, it seemed to be working.

“Thanks,” Bucky muttered, taking the plate. Then he closed the door before Steve could say anything else.

Steve poured himself a glass of whiskey and carried it out onto the balcony. He couldn’t get drunk but he still liked the bite of it, still liked the way it warmed his throat as it went down, still liked the way it made him feel like a person instead of a dancing monkey. He sat on one of the enameled cast-iron chairs and leaned back against the wall, watching the stars inch across the sky as the sea crashed against the shore below.

Some men were out past curfew, splashing drunkenly in the moonlit water, but Steve wasn’t about to stop them and nobody else did, either. Surviving hell entitled you to certain liberties, he thought, and a night swim seemed harmless enough.

_Thomas Warren, 22, Chicago. Louis Gurevitz, 19, Boston. Gary Allensworth, 32, Topeka. Jim Murphy, 18, Anchorage. Mike Kowalski, 25, Allentown._

Having a photographic memory was helpful in life, he’d realized, but it was a lousy thing to have during war, because it meant he’d be carrying everything he saw at Kreischberg with him for the rest of his life. Even during the darkest days of the Depression, when men sometimes froze to death on the street, Steve had never seen men as badly starved as some of these men had been. And the untreated sickness, the gangrenous wounds, the unset fractures—not even during the Depression had he seen such desperation. Of the nearly 372 survivors he’d rescued from Kreischberg, 48 had died of their injuries or illnesses on the long journey to Azzano, each hastily-dug grave another testament to how desperately unprepared he was for the job he’d thought he could do.

The least he could do was remember their names.

_Ben Robinson, 19, Harlem. Bobby Kimbro, 18, Little Rock. Eddy Martinez, 17, Laredo._

He was so lost in thought, he didn’t register Bucky’s presence until he stepped out onto the balcony.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve said. He pushed the whiskey and the second glass across the table toward him. “Go to town.”

Bucky poured himself a double measure and downed it in one swallow, then poured himself another. “Thanks for the food,” he said gruffly.

“Yeah, of course.”

“Sure beats Austria,” Bucky added, gesturing with his glass toward the seashore, and Steve froze because this was the first time Bucky had so much as mentioned what happened to him.

“Yeah.”

But Bucky didn’t continue and Steve decided not to push. “They’re going to let me stay and fight,” he said instead. “Said I could form a squad if I wanted, special assignment to hunt HYDRA.”

“Must be a dream come true for you.”

“Not a dream,” Steve said. “Duty.”

Bucky rolled his eyes and let out a soft chuckle. “You keep telling yourself that.”

“I want you to come with me,” Steve said. “Be my second in command. I can’t do it without you.”

“Sure you can,” Bucky said humorlessly, swirling the whiskey around in his glass before knocking the rest of it back. “You’re Captain America.”

“Don’t do this, Buck.”

“Do what?”

“I didn’t ask for this, okay? All I wanted was the chance to do my part, same as anyone else here.”

Bucky laughed bitterly. “You think they were ever gonna give a damn about what you want?”

“I know they don’t,” Steve said. “But if there’s a chance to make a real difference, I’m gonna take it.”

Bucky shook his head and refilled his glass. “Nothing’s ever gonna make a difference in this war, Stevie.”

Steve shrugged. “Gotta try anyway, though. Right? Who are we if we don’t?”

A slow smile drifts across Bucky’s face—maybe the first genuine smile Steve’s seen since Austria.

“What’s so funny?” Steve asks, venturing a smile in return.

“It really _is_ you in that big meathead body of yours, isn’t it.”

“Look, it’s not like I got to pick out the one I wanted at the store, all right?” Steve protested, exasperated. “I feel like I’m wearing a goddamned gorilla suit.”

“Nah,” Bucky said, touching his foot to Steve’s. “You look good.”

Steve looked at Bucky’s foot and then at his face questioningly. Bucky didn’t answer it, just finished his whiskey and went back inside. Steve hesitated, then changed his mind and followed him.

He found Bucky standing in the doorway of Steve’s room.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey yourself,” Bucky replied, standing aside to let Steve in.

“You sure you want this?” Steve asked.

Bucky shrugged. “Might not get another chance for a while.”

“Doesn’t mean we have to take this one.”

Bucky shut him up with a kiss, and Steve’s legs weakened in a way they hadn’t since 1942.

“Missed that,” Steve said, kissing him more deeply.

Bucky didn’t answer, just bit his lip hungrily and began to wrestle Steve’s belt off. There was an angry urgency to what Bucky was doing, and Steve knew they weren’t going to have the tender reunion he’d been hoping for, but that was all right, because he understood this all too well, too—this desperation to feel human again after something awful. There would be time enough for gentleness later.

He allowed Bucky to yank down his pants and shorts, turn him around, bend him over the mattress, and fuck him hard and fast with his spit-slick cock till he came.

“Jesus Christ,” Steve said when Bucky was done.

Bucky pulled out and dragged his shorts back up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t very—” He shook his head and shrugged.

“It’s okay, Buck,” Steve said. “I missed you, too, you know.”

Bucky blushed a little.

“Come here,” Steve said, pulling him into a hard hug. “It’s all right, Buck. We’re all right.”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” Bucky said softly. “Fucking you like that. Ever since—”

“Hey,” Steve said, nuzzling his neck a little. “I love you, you know that?”

“I should be dead,” Bucky said softly, tightening his arms around Steve’s waist.

“Don’t say that.”

“If you hadn’t shown up when you did—”

“But I did show up.”

“I know,” Bucky said unhappily. “I just—how can I owe you for something like that now?”

“Bucky, you don’t owe me anything.”

“Just my whole goddamned life.”

“No,” Steve said firmly, tipping Bucky’s chin up with his finger to meet his eyes. “You do not owe me for that, do you understand me?”

“I know,” Bucky said, kissing Steve’s chin and breaking into a sly little grin. “Just not used to being the one who needs rescuing, I guess.”

Steve swatted Bucky’s ass and kissed him again. “Low blow, Barnes.”

“If you insist,” Bucky said conspiratorially. He kissed Steve one more time, and dropped to his knees.

*****************************

They bring him in by helicopter.

Steve waits on the porch, staying well out of the rotor wash, as Peggy clamps down her hair as best she could and hurries up to the side door as it slides open. It’s a bright afternoon and it’s hard to see anything but shadows inside the bird, but he could spot Bucky’s silhouette anywhere—and he feels his breathing go slow and shallow, as if even his lungs are too cautious to allow himself to truly believe he might have actually lived to see him again.

And there’s Bucky in the helicopter 100 yards away. Right now. Right here.

There are other people—guards—in the chopper with Bucky, and Steve can tell that they’re unshackling him. The thought of Bucky making the journey in chains sends a hot flush of rage through him, but he doesn’t have time to dwell on that, because Peggy is holding out her hand and Bucky is taking it and the guard behind him has placed a steadying hand at Bucky’s back for balance because SHIELD had never given him his arm back.

(More precisely, Peggy admitted with no small degree of shame, the SHIELD techs had accidentally activated a self-destruct feature the KGB had buried deep in the computer circuitry in case the arm fell into enemy hands. Fortunately one of them survived the explosion long enough to transmit the specs to Howard before she died.)

It’s hard, seeing the sleeve of his shirt pinned up like that. He’s wearing civvies instead of his prison jumpsuit, at least—an oxford shirt and corduroys and a pair of sneakers—and the long hair and beard and modern clothes look strange on him but at least they fit well enough that Steve could tell Peggy had been telling the truth about his good health. He looks hale and strong and he moves with an easy, powerful grace that floods Steve with relief.

Bucky is alive.

He and Peggy exchange a few words and she kisses his cheek and pats his shoulder and points toward the house.

And Bucky turns and sees Steve for the first time.

He raises his hand in greeting, and Steve raises his, and then Bucky breaks into a fast walk—almost a jog—toward the house.

Bucky is alive, and he’s here. And as he comes closer to the house, Steve can see how haunted he was, how anxious and overwhelmed and a thousand other feelings there aren’t words for, but he’s alive and he’s here, and the rest—the rest could be figured out later.

Steve makes his way down the porch stairs and begins to close the distance with long, loping strides, each step faster than the last, until they’re nearly close enough to touch.

And then something happens—a mutual shyness descends, and they stop just short of one another. Instead of falling into each other’s arms as Steve would have wanted, they simply look at one another, each drinking in the sight of the other like lost men at an oasis.

Steve’s eyes can’t decide where to rest—they dart from Bucky’s face to his left shoulder and back again, as though each were equally unbelievable. His face has a weathering to it that it didn’t have before—new crinkles around his eyes, a tiny shot of gray in the stubble of his beard.

“Buck—” Steve breathes, his voice stumbling over the name.

“Hey,” Bucky says, a strange sad smile on his face. The sound of his voice is the most beautiful thing Steve’s ever heard and he breaks into a teary grin and holds his arms out to him. 

Bucky steps cautiously into the hug and wraps his arm around Steve’s back. Steve holds him gently at first, then tightening his grip when Bucky tucks his chin against Steve’s neck. The one-armed hug feels lopsided and wrong and Steve tries not to feel sad about that, because somehow after everything Bucky’s been through, he still smells the same, and for the first time since Steve woke up in the hospital he feels like maybe the future could feel like home.

“Is this real?” Bucky murmurs into his ear.

“God, I hope so,” Steve says, his eyes prickling with tears. “I thought I’d lost you.”

But it’s the wrong thing to say. Bucky stiffens and lets go; Steve steps back awkwardly with a muttered “sorry” and shoves his hands into his pockets.

Behind Bucky, he sees that Jarvis is already carrying Peggy’s bags to the chopper; he’d finally persuaded her to leave him alone here with Bucky for a while, though a complement of SHIELD commandos would stay behind, just in case. Whether it’s to protect Steve from Bucky or protect them both from the Soviets or to simply make sure two legally deceased super-soldiers don’t try to break out of their luxury prison until the government can figure out what to do with them, Steve doesn’t know.

But he doesn’t care. Bucky is alive and he’s here.

Now Jarvis is handing Peggy up onto the chopper and sliding the door shut and the bird is lifting into the sky. Steve looks up and raises his hand in farewell, and Bucky does too, and they stand there until Peggy’s too far away for them to see in the window.

*****************************

Steve takes Bucky into the house. Jarvis stays tactfully out of the way, carrying Bucky’s duffel bag in through the kitchen entrance and then vanishing upstairs to make up Bucky’s room. They’re giving him the one across from Steve’s—close enough to make the invitation implicit without rushing anyone. There’s no way to know what Bucky needs or wants right now. Steve isn’t sure he knows what he needs, either.

“You want a beer or something?” Steve asks, suddenly awkward. Bucky’s giving him a strange, skeptical look that Steve can’t parse, and he’s grateful to have an excuse to break off for a few moments to go to the fridge.

“This is Howard’s place?” Bucky calls from the living room.

“His cabin, he calls it,” Steve says. “I think he takes a kind of perverse pride in the false modesty.”

“Sounds like Howard,” Bucky says. “What’s he like now? Still an asshole?”

“Married, if you can believe it.”

“She must be a saint.”

“Peggy thinks so,” Steve says, thumbing the caps off the beer bottles as he returns.

Bucky doesn’t respond, and when Steve reaches the living room, he sees Bucky sitting on the sofa, the dossier lying open in his lap, a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the table next to him.

“Buck, don’t read that,” Steve says, setting the beers aside and hurrying over. He sits next to Bucky and gently closes the cover of the dossier and moves it back to the coffee table. 

“Not a pretty story, is it,” Bucky says gruffly.

“Story’s not over yet.”

Bucky shrugs but doesn’t reply.

“It’s not your fault,” Steve says forcefully. “None of it was your fault. Not what they did to you and not what they made you do. It’s not your fault.”

Bucky sighs. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Talk like the psychiatrist,” he says. “I’m sick of it.” He grinds out the cigarette and lights another, and Steve notices that he does it differently now, holding the cigarette with his teeth instead of steadying it with his lost hand.

What a stupid thing to miss—the way he lights a cigarette. But he does.

“What am I supposed to say, then? ‘Gee whiz, Buck, looks like you’re fucked six ways from Sunday?’”

Bucky laughs softly. “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“I’m not going to say that.”

“I know.”

Steve wants to hold Bucky’s hand, but he realizes he’s sitting on the wrong side so he places the flat of his palm between his shoulder blades instead. He can feel the ridge of a thick, curving scar along the edge of his left scapula—from where his prosthesis attached to the bone, according to the diagram. He runs his thumb over it once, lightly, then gently slides his hand up to Bucky’s right shoulder, hooking his hand against his neck the way they used to do when they were kids.

Bucky’s muscles go rigid beneath Steve’s touch, and after a moment he realizes that Bucky doesn’t like this—that he’s just trying to make Steve happy. Steve takes his hand away quickly.

“You didn’t want me to touch you,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t bother me anymore, it’s just—” Bucky shakes his head. “Never mind.”

“Bucky, if your feelings have changed, I understand,” Steve says, though his voice chokes on the words. “What they did to you—"

“Look, I never planned to come back to you in the first place, okay?” Bucky says abruptly. “I was going to drop Peggy across the Austrian border with the coordinates and then disappear, stay ahead of the KGB for as long as I could, and eat a bullet once they got too close.”

Steve exhales hard to settle his pounding heart. “Jesus, Buck. Why?”

“Figured I’d rather die on my own terms than in the electric chair here,” Bucky says flatly. “Didn’t want you to see me go out like that.”

Steve swallows hard. “What changed your mind?”

“Peggy convinced me I might have a shot at getting my life back,” Bucky says, taking a long drag off his cigarette. “But I gotta be honest, Stevie—it’s all starting to feel like a huge mistake.”

“Why?”

“Because I look at you, and I look at all this, and I know I don’t belong here,” Bucky says, focusing on the sun setting through the picture window across the room. “I don’t deserve to get a life like this back. And you can say what I did all those years wasn’t my fault till you’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t make it true.”

“No, Bucky. It wasn’t you doing those things, do you understand me? It wasn’t you.”

Bucky doesn’t respond at first. Instead, he leans over to the coffee table and taps the Soviet notebook. “You think this is the real me,” he says, tapping the cover. As he does, the cuff of his shirt slides up, revealing a wide ring of scar tissue around his wrist, as though he’d been chained for a long time.

Then he moves his hand to the dossier and opens it again, flipping through the pages until he reaches the security camera still showing him strangling the woman. “But this the real me, too. I did this. I remember doing it. I remember what it felt like. I remember being proud of a job well done.” He looks at Steve, a challenge in his eyes. “They used my body and my mind to kill 27 people, and yet part of me is still proud of every single one of them. Do you understand how sick that is? Do you understand what they turned me into?”

Steve swallows hard and picks up the photo to look at it more closely. According to the label, she was a Project PEGASUS computer engineer named Vera McDonald, and she’d been working on an algorithm for a dampening system that would make it possible to focus the Tesseract’s energy in a perpetual, controlled beam. She must have been close, if the Soviets had wanted her dead.

He doesn’t need to look at it—it’s already seared irreversibly onto his brain—but he does it to force himself to sit with the pain and the terror on the woman’s face as she realizes she’s not going to survive this, that her mission is compromised, that the children in the photograph on the desk behind her will never see her again. He looks at the photo for a long, long time.

He blinks back tears and puts the picture back in the dossier, then before he quite realizes what he’s doing, he wings the dossier into the fireplace. They watch as the flames blacken and curl the paper, sparks popping off of paperclips and staples, sizzling the ink on the photographs. 

Bucky stands and goes to the fireplace, watching the flames consume the last of the dossier. “There are some things that just can’t ever be forgiven,” he says angrily, flicking his cigarette butt into the fire. “Whether you burn the evidence or not.”

*****************************

The water in Bucky’s bathroom has been running for more than half an hour. He’d abruptly turned and left the room after dropping his cigarette into the fire, incandescent with a white-hot rage that told Steve, without any hint of a doubt, that he didn’t want to be followed.

So Steve waited. He drank his beer and he drank Bucky’s beer and chatted distractedly in the kitchen with Ana as she roasted a chicken and chopped vegetables, trying to brief her on everything he remembered Bucky liking to eat so she could make some of his favorites for a while.

It’s not until Jarvis comes into the kitchen with a concerned look and a tactful, “Mr. Barnes appears to be taking quite a long time in the shower,” that Steve’s unease shifts into true worry.

“Thank you, Jarvis,” Steve says. He takes the stairs two at a time—and he’s only a little winded by the time he gets to the top—and takes a moment to calm himself before knocking on Bucky’s door.

“Buck?” he calls. “It’s me.”

There’s no answer, so Steve lets himself in. The room is hot and humid from the shower; Bucky hasn’t closed the bathroom door all the way and it’s fogged the October-chilled windows white.

“Buck?” he calls again, this time more panicky, but again, there’s no answer. He knocks lightly on the propped-open door. “You all right in there?”

When there’s still no answer, he pulls the door open all the way.

Bucky’s sitting naked on the floor, leaning back against the tub, his knees pulled up to his chin and his head tucked down in the crook of his arm. Steve is shocked by the sight of him: He’s somehow much too thin and unnaturally muscular at the same time, like his skin is two sizes too small for his body. A footlong streak of old, badly healed road rash extends most of the length of his right thigh and his right arm is peppered with shrapnel scars. On his right side, just above his hip and curving down across his belly, is an old, old scar—the emergency appendectomy he had when he was 15, and almost died. The emergency appendectomy that made Steve realize that he loved Bucky, that he wasn’t sure he could live without him.

“Bucky?” Steve repeats, and this time he hears him.

“Sorry,” Bucky says, turning his face toward Steve and jabs his thumb backward at the streaming shower. The drain is plugged and the tub is more than halfway full, making the shower sound like rain falling on a lake. “Helps quiet my head.”

Steve reaches over him and turns the water off, testing the temperature as he does. It’s still plenty hot, faintly steaming, even, and Steve has an idea.

“You want to get in the tub?” he asks gently, holding out his hand. “Water’s nice.”

Bucky nods and takes his hand. Steve turns his eyes away to give him privacy but then Bucky says, “Cut it out,” so quietly Steve’s not sure he spoke at all.

“What?”

“You don’t need to look away,” Bucky says. “Just don’t fucking cry, okay?”

“Okay,” Steve says, but when he turns his head he inhales sharply, his eyes rapidly scanning the fixing on the swath of scar tissue sweeping across the left side of his chest and the fist-sized knot that’s all that remains of his left arm. “Jesus, Buck,” he says before he can stop himself.

“Steve,” Bucky warns.

“I didn’t mean—” Steve starts. “Does it hurt?”

Bucky shrugs, and Steve watches the little knot on his left shoulder flex and relax with the gesture.

Steve swallows his heartbreak and nods toward the tub. “Come on, in you go.”

As Bucky turns toward the tub, Steve gets a full view of the damage HYDRA did to his body. Steve can’t look at him without thinking of the diagram, without matching each scar to its corresponding injury—the bullet holes and the stab wounds and the burns and the whip lashes crisscrossing his back, and, for a brief second as he lifts his foot over the side of the tub, the small, white, star-like scars on his balls from where they’d electrocuted him with a car battery.

Bucky sighs a little as he sinks into the water and stretches out the full length of the tub. “Feels good,” he says, closing his eyes. And then, to Steve’s surprise: “You can stay if you want.”

“All right,” Steve says. He puts the lid of the toilet seat down and sits facing Bucky, drinking in the miracle of his presence. For the first time Steve wonders if they’ll ever be intimate again—whether he’ll want to be, whether he even can, after everything that was done to him. The question shames him—he should just be glad that Bucky’s safe and that he’s letting Steve come close to him—and he banishes it immediately. Whether it takes months or years or forever, Steve knows he’s not going anywhere.

_To the end of the line, pal._

“Can’t remember the last time I did this,” Bucky says, then breaks into a wry smile. “Can’t remember a lot of things from before, though. Fair warning.”

“You remember us,” Steve says. “That’s all I need.”

Bucky makes a little hum of acceptance and rests his arm along the edge of the tub. Steve takes his hand and Bucky’s face doesn’t change, but he curls his thumb around Steve’s, and Steve’s breath catches in his throat.

Suddenly a flash of panic crosses Bucky’s face and he takes his hand away to stand up.

“What’s wrong?” Steve asks.

“Everything,” Bucky says distractedly, climbing out of the tub and reaching for his towel.

“What does that mean?”

Bucky doesn’t answer, just hurries into the bedroom and begins to get dressed.

“Buck, what’s going on?” Steve asks, following him.

“I don’t—” Bucky gestures around the room with his undershirt. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“Yes, Bucky, you should,” Steve says, reaching for his arm. “You should be here.”

The next thing he knows, Bucky’s muscled him onto the floor and pinned him with his knee and hand, and headbutts him so hard he sees stars.

“Let me GO,” Bucky growls, stepping over Steve and hurrying out the door.

It’s only after Steve’s head clears that he realizes Bucky had spoken in Russian.

He grabs the bedpost and drags himself up, then limps down the stairs, where he finds Jarvis wringing his hands by the front door.

“He’s outside, sir,” Jarvis says quietly, then plucks one of Howard’s jackets off the coat tree and hands it to Steve. “He might need this.”

*****************************

He finds Bucky down at the lake, a dark shadow on the dock against the moonlight reflecting off the water. He’s smoking again, the tip of his cigarette a faint orange dot moving in a slow arc to and from his lips. He had never smoked this much, not even during the war, when cigarettes were easier to get than food sometimes. 

He doesn’t look up when Steve steps onto the doc, or when Steve drapes the coat over his bare shoulders.

“This past month, I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I might have changed if I could do things over with you,” Steve says as he sits. “And the one thing I keep coming back to is this: I would have you I loved you more often,” he says. “And I would have told you much sooner.”

“Please don’t do this,” Bucky says quietly.

“I love you, Bucky,” Steve says, looking at him. “Nothing in that folder changes that.”

Bucky blows a long, exasperated stream of smoke and shakes his head. “You still don’t get it.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“With HYDRA, your choices are either comply, or die. That’s it. That’s what it comes down to,” Bucky says. “And I didn’t die, did I? That was a decision I made. I chose to do it. I accepted it.”

“That wasn’t a choice, as much as they made it seem like one.”

“You’re talking like a headshrinker again.”

“Okay, fine,” Steve says. “This is what I know: When you said some things can never be forgiven, you were right. I’ll never forgive HYDRA for what they did to you—not for all the ways they hurt you and not for all the lies they made you believe about yourself. _That_’s what’s unforgivable.”

“You think you can save me but you can’t, Stevie,” Bucky says wearily. “You can’t.”

“When has that ever stopped me from trying?” Steve asks. “Look, I know we may never get back what we used to have. And I’m not going to push you into anything you don’t want. I just need you to know that whatever you decide, I’m always going to be on your side, okay? To the end of the line, Buck, I mean it. I’m never going to give up on you.”

“What’s that mean, exactly? What aren’t you giving up on?”

“There’s so much I want for you,” Steve says, his voice breaking a little. He puts his hand on Bucky’s back, and this time Bucky leans into his touch a little. A little flash of hope flares up inside him, but he tries to ignore it. There’s so much he still doesn’t know about what Bucky does and doesn’t need right now. “But mostly I want you to figure out how to live with this. I want you to figure out how to forgive yourself.”

Bucky gives him a tight smile and shakes his head. “Not today.”

Steve aches to touch him everywhere, to kiss his scars and reacquaint his skin with kindness, to shield his body with his own from a world that’s hurt him far too much, to soothe his heartbreak with all the love he can give. For now, though, he hopes it’s enough for Bucky to know he’s here.

“I know,” he says. “But will you agree to try?"

Bucky take a deep drag off his cigarette and then coughs a little. He swallows hard and just barely glances Steve's way before turning his gaze back out toward the lake. And then he nods. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Bucky finally begins to heal. So does Steve. (That happy ending I mentioned in the tags? It's coming.)


	9. Second Chance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One day, as they’re walking through the woods on the south side of the property, Bucky talks about the orchids that grow in Siberia during its brief summer, rich magenta petals with delicate spiderweb veins.
> 
> “Probably a metaphor in there somewhere,” he says with a slight smile. “But fuck if I know what it is.”

Eventually they return to the house. They eat the chicken that Ana had cooked and drink the wine that Jarvis had brought up from the cellar and sit by the fire with Howard’s good scotch until their eyes grew heavy.

Steve brings his sketchbook downstairs and lets Bucky look through it. Steve watches him as he does, basking hopefully in the little reactions that flit across Bucky’s face with each page he turns—the raised eyebrow, the small smile, the little huffing laugh. Looking at a sketch of himself sitting on a rock, holding a dented tin cup of Dugan’s awful coffee in both hands, his face stills and he makes a soft, curious noise that Steve can’t decipher.

“What is it?” Steve asks.

“Trying to remember what it felt like to have both of them,” Bucky says, and Steve understands immediately that he’s talking about his hand. “Couldn’t feel much with the Soviet one.”

“Howard can make you a new one,” Steve says hopefully. “Maybe one that can feel again.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Bucky says gruffly. “It’s not the same.”

“No.”

“What’s this supposed to be?” Bucky asks, changing the subject. He’s turned to the last page of the sketchbook.

“You,” Steve says, blushing. “I was going to draw you naked.”

Bucky laughs softly, hands Steve the notebook, and picks up his scotch. “We ever finish that drawing back in your place? The one for your class?”

“No.” Steve had dropped out of art school the day after the attack on Pearl, so determined was he to enlist.

Bucky nods, his face slipping back into that impassive, neutral expression that had become his habit, and sips his scotch. “Think I’ll turn in early,” he says. "I'm across the hall from you, right?"

“Yeah,” Steve says, trying to shove his disappointment down as far as he can to keep it away from his voice. “See you in the morning?”

Bucky gives him a resigned look as he stands up. “Where else am I gonna go?”

*****************************

A nightmare wakes Steve a little before dawn—his mind never seems to tire of finding new and devastating ways to cobble his worst memories together—and blearily he realizes there’s something on the other side of his door.

Suddenly as alert and awake as if he’d taken an adrenaline shot, he gets out of bed and moves to the door as silently as he can. There’s a loaded gun in the top drawer of the dresser along the way, but as he reaches for it, he realizes he doesn’t need it.

The noise he hears is snoring. Soft, light, almost just a rasp of breath. Familiar as anything. Steve lets out a ragged breath, not daring to do anything louder lest he wake Bucky up, and grabs the little decorative pillow and the little knitted lap blanket from the armchair next to the door. Steve wraps up in the blanket as best he can and rests his head on the tiny pillow next to the door, and lies there next to Bucky, watching the sky lighten until he hears Bucky get up and return to his room.

He doesn’t say anything about it at breakfast and neither does Bucky. They spend the day quietly, exploring the grounds, reading by the fire, eating too much of all the delicious food Ana wants to stuff them with. They don’t talk about much, but Steve doesn’t mind—he’s used to passing his days in near-silence. Now he just does it with Bucky nearby.

He watches Bucky as the days pass, trying to get used to the sight of him, the missing arm and the long hair and the older face and the unusual, wolf-like way he moves now. He watches the careful way Bucky ties his shoes and manages the zipper on his coat and feeds a record back into its sleeve one-handed. One day he fumbles a fresh pack of cigarettes as he’s trying to open it and, quicker than Steve can register, he catches it before it hits the floor. It’s impressive and terrifying and he begins to finally understand what Peggy told him he could do with a knife.

Bucky sleeps outside of Steve’s door all week. Finally Steve says, as casually as he can, “My door’s unlocked, you know.”

“I know,” Bucky says, not looking at him, and then he skips another rock across the lake.

Sometimes they go for walks around the property, pick apples from the tree outside the house for Ana to put into a pie, rake the leaves in the yard because neither one of them has ever learned how to be idle. There’s small gymnasium—really just a room—at the back of the house that has some weights and a heavy bag, and sometimes after Steve’s done with his physical therapy, he’ll wrap Bucky’s hand and watch him beat the shit out of it.

Even one-armed, Bucky could probably match him in a fight right now if he wanted to. Steve’s not afraid, though. Mostly he’s just sad, knowing how all that strength and skill was forced into him, knowing what it did to him, knowing that he’d never asked for any of it. But he has it, so he’ll use it, because growing up during the Depression had taught him never to waste anything, even hell.

Steve leans against the bag to hold it steady, feeling the force of Bucky’s punches roll through the sand like an earthquake, and even though he braces himself the best he can, he can feel the bag pushing him back with every strike. And yet—

“Stop pulling your punches,” Steve says. “Let me see what you really can do.”

Bucky nods. “Back away.”

Steve releases the bag and steps to the side, and then Bucky wallops the bag so hard his fist tears through the leather and sand begins to pour out onto the mat.

Steve lets out a low whistle. “Wow.”

Bucky shakes his head and turns away from the bag to look out the window. The mountains are afire with turning leaves, and a few dance on a gust of wind past the glass. “I hate knowing I can do that,” he admits. “You know me, I was never afraid of a fight before, but this—"

“You wonder if you can trust yourself with it.”

Bucky straightens quickly and looks back at him in surprise. “You wonder that too?”

“Sure.”

“I ever ask you about that before? During the war?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I should have.”

“It’s okay,” Steve says. “We missed a lot of chances, you know?”

“Yeah.” Bucky raises his hand to his mouth and works the tucked-in end of the boxing wrap loose from the folds with his teeth, then rolls his hand in quick, precise circles to unwind it onto the floor in a neat little pile. “They going to send you back to the Army, you think?”

“I don’t know,” Steve admits. He’s been trying not to think about it, to be honest. The world’s changed so much, he’s not sure what his place could be in it anymore. Though Peggy was right—there would always be another war, and he supposed he could always fight it.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do with me,” Bucky says. “What they’ll let me do, I mean.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know if I want to fight anymore.”

Something twists in Steve’s gut at this—it’s the death of an assumption he didn’t realize he’d been carrying around with him since Bucky returned, that whatever life lay before them now, they’d still be able to share it. But if Steve went back to the Army and Bucky didn’t—

He doesn’t want to think about that.

“I won’t let anyone make you fight again if you don’t want to,” Steve says, forcing the words around his grief. “I promise.”

“Don’t,” Bucky says, a look of weary disappointment crossing his face.

“Don’t what?”

“People like us don’t get to decide those things,” he says. “Just because they chose not to charge me with treason before doesn’t mean they won’t change their minds. If they order me to pick up a gun again, you know what’s going to happen if I say no.”

Steve winces but doesn’t argue. He can’t.

He feels the cold Alpine wind biting the exposed skin between his glove and his sleeve, feels the bone-shaking rattle of the train’s chassis as it speeds across the Danube River gorge, feels the almost-touch of Bucky’s fingers against his as the rail breaks loose with a shriek that Steve can’t tell is human or metal. He sees the look on Bucky’s face change the second he realizes he’s a dead man. He sees the look on Bucky’s face—a mix of grief and resignation and surprise—when he realizes not even Steve can save him. 

He reaches forward and puts his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky covers Steve’s hand with his own, squeezes it, then pushes it off and leaves the room. 

*****************************

Bucky sleeps outside Steve’s door for another week, and Steve doesn’t say anything more about it. Bucky’s still coiled as tight as a steel spring most of the time, but bit by bit he’s beginning—not to relax, exactly, but at least get used to the idea of safety again.

Still, sometimes he’ll abruptly withdraw into a distant silence that could last for hours—not ignoring Steve, exactly, but not engaging with him, either, much as he had during those first days after Kreischberg. It’s as though he’s too afraid to trust that Steve is real, that he’s the same person he used to know. All Steve can do is show him, as many ways as he can, that he is.

One morning he comes down to breakfast pale and exhausted and silent, and Steve knows immediately he hasn’t slept a wink. Bucky doesn’t say anything, doesn’t eat—just looks around the house with a slightly panicked expression, then goes to the sofa and curls up with a blanket.

“You feeling okay, Buck?” Steve asks, but he doesn’t answer, just lies there with his eyes open but not seeing, trapped within his own waking nightmare.

Steve stays close, rubs his back a little, tries to figure out what it means when Bucky just closes his eyes tightly when he does. Then he decides it probably means he doesn’t like it and stops.

Instead, he gathers up his sketchbook and the newspaper and a couple of paperbacks and takes up residence in the easy chair near the sofa, where Bucky can see him. Jarvis lights a fire and brings them tea, which Steve drinks and Bucky ignores, and Steve plays a few records they’d liked from before the war, and then after lunch, which Bucky eats a few bites of, Steve turns on the television and they watch the Cardinals smoke the Tigers in Game 4 of the World Series. The Cardinals pitcher is so good even Bucky watches a little, but just a little, before slipping back into whatever swamp he’d gotten stuck in.

Bucky doesn’t want to go upstairs that night, so Steve reluctantly leaves him on the couch when it’s time for bed. He doesn’t think he’ll sleep but he does, and in the morning, Bucky is still there, and Ana Jarvis is dozing—in yesterday’s dress, as best as Steve can tell—in Steve’s armchair. Steve wakes her, thanks her profusely, assures her he can manage meals for the day, and sends her back to bed.

The next day passes much as the first, with a fire, books, music, and baseball. Finally, sometime during the fourth inning of Game 5, when Steve isn’t looking, Bucky lapses into a troubled sleep on the sofa from which he doesn’t wake till the next morning. When he does, he mumbles “good morning” and goes upstairs to shower. By the time he comes back downstairs, he seems muted, still, but much otherwise ready for the day—and very ready for breakfast.

When Steve asks him what had happened, Bucky just shakes his head. “Zola,” he says, and that’s all he’ll say about it.

Gradually, though he begins to talk a little about his past, but just a little. He talks about seeing the Pyramids of Giza from the roof of a Cairo office building, about the curious street child in Mexico City sold him a flower and a lottery ticket as he waited outside a bakery one morning, about nearly getting frostbite from lingering outside too long to watch the Northern Lights over Tromsø in the middle of February. He doesn't talk about why he was in those places, what he was doing there, and Steve doesn't ask. 

One day, as they’re walking through the woods on the south side of the property, he talks about the orchids that grow in Siberia during its brief summer, rich magenta petals with delicate spiderweb veins.

“Probably a metaphor in there somewhere,” he says with a slight smile. “But fuck if I know what it is.”

“Were you—” Steve begins. “This is a strange question, but were you ever happy there? Did you have any friends?”

Bucky smiles shyly. “No, but I had a cat, kind of.”

“A cat?”

“The base where I lived—they had cats to control the mice. A few years ago, one of them took a shine to me. She’d even recognize me after I’d been in cryo for a while.”

“She have a name?”

“No, I just called her Koshka—that’s ‘cat’ in Russian.”

“I know Russian, Buck. Remember?” Steve says gently. “We all learned it for the Kronas mission.”

“Huh,” Bucky says. “I was wondering how I knew it.”

“What kind of cat was Koshka?”

“I don’t know. A white one. Deaf, too, and mean as hell. Guess she had to be, to survive in a place like that,” Bucky says, his face softening a little at the memory. “She’d hiss and try to claw the shit out of anyone who tried to touch her, but she liked me, for some reason. Always rubbed up against my ankle, even let me pet her sometimes. She liked to bring me her kills, which made me laugh.” He laughs a little. “If it was winter, she’d come sleep on my feet. Sometimes she’d purr, and that was—nice.”

Steve melts a little with gratitude at the thought of Bucky sitting on his metal cot in his cell, gently stroking the head of a sleeping cat. “Guess she thought you were a kindred spirit.”

Bucky nods. “I liked her,” he says softly, a small smile crossing his face. “She made me feel human.”

Bucky takes Steve’s hand, then, lacing his fingers through it. He’s started to do this, too—not just accepting Steve’s affection without flinching but giving it, too—and it still surprises Steve every time that he can do this, even after everything that had been done to him. And he knows he shouldn't hope, but he can't help but wonder if it means more of Bucky survived than either one of them knew. 

*****************************

That night, Steve wakes to the sound of his door opening and watches Bucky step inside his bedroom for the first time since he arrived. He’s wearing a t-shirt and flannel pajama pants, and Steve realizes with relief that he’d been afraid Bucky had been sleeping fully clothed every night all this time. Steve doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything, but in the faint moonlight Bucky sees that his eyes are open and freezes.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve says softly, lifting a corner of the quilt. “You want to get in?”

Bucky hesitates for a moment, then nods. He moves silently around the foot of the bed and Steve holds his breath as he does, so delicate is this moment—he doesn’t even look back to see how Bucky is choosing to lie down with him. He feels the quilt shift and Bucky’s weight sink into the mattress, and then a miracle happens and Bucky is spooning up right behind him.

He’s lying on his left side and even with the softness of the mattress Steve knows it can’t be easy on his shoulder to do that, but he understands the reason when Bucky slides his arm around Steve’s chest and rests his hand against Steve’s heart.

Steve bites his lip to steady himself, but his breathing’s gone ragged as it fights in his throat against a sob. He tries to be quiet about it, but he knows the gig’s up when Bucky pulls him close and tightens his grip.

Steve takes Bucky’s hand in his and presses a small kiss—not even a kiss, just a touch of his lips—to Bucky's palm and says, “I love you.”

He can feel Bucky’s heart pounding against his back, and then Bucky’s fingers tighten around his. “Love you too, Stevie.”

Bucky’s breath is soft and warm and familiar against Steve’s ear, and he reaches back with his foot and twines his ankle around Bucky’s. “The thing is, I watched you die,” Steve says, and it’s not a fair thing to do, maybe, to ask Bucky to bear his pain too, but he can’t help it anymore. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget it.”

“I didn’t know that,” Bucky says softly. “I didn’t know you saw it happen. I don’t remember that part.”

“I was trying to reach you, but the bar you were hanging from broke and I couldn’t get to you in time,” Steve says steadily. “I’m so sorry, Buck.”

“It’s not your fault. We all knew the risks.”

“You had no idea what you were risking,” Steve says. “If I’d just been a little faster—”

“I'd be an old man and you’d probably still be under the ice right now,” Bucky says sharply. “I can’t what-if my life, Stevie. I’ll lose my mind if I do. Let’s just—be here now, okay? Just be here with me.”

Steve squeezes Bucky’s arm. “All right,” he says.

Then Steve could swear he feels something break—physically break—inside Bucky’s chest and he begins to shake, and then he begins to weep. It’s a keening wail, a sound Steve’s never heard him make before, and it cracks his heart in so many ways he can’t begin to count them.

Steve rolls over to face him and holds him tight and strokes his hair and murmurs any soothing thing he can think of into his ear, but Bucky’s inconsolable. He shifts his weight and twists his legs and buries his face into his pillow, but there’s no movement, no shape he can fold himself into that will bring him any relief. Steve just holds him, rocks him as best he can, tells him he loves him over and over and over again as Bucky cries.

Eventually, after what feels like hours but probably wasn’t, the storm passes, and Bucky’s breath settles into a weary, ragged rhythm.

“Sorry about that,” Bucky mutters, and Steve can feel the heat of his blush even in the darkness of the room.

“Don’t be,” Steve says, carding his fingertips through Bucky’s hair. He’s getting used to the length now—kind of likes it, actually. “You should have seen me when Peggy told me you were alive. Went on like a baby for I don’t know how long.”

Bucky laughs softly and rolls onto his back. He reaches up and touches Steve’s face, traces the curves and planes of it with the gentlest of pressure, pushing a stray lock of hair away from his brow. He lets his thumb drift across Steve’s lips, and Steve smiles and the next thing he knows, Bucky’s hand has slipped behind his neck and is guiding his head toward him for a kiss.

It’s delicate and darting at first—Steve whimpers a little, and tries to blink back his tears before they fall onto Bucky’s face, but he’s not fast enough. They kiss through the salt and damp, and it takes everything Steve has to hold back his hunger, to let Bucky set the pace. But soon, the kiss becomes more urgent and Steve allows himself to respond, to part Bucky’s lips and teeth with his tongue and something shifts deep inside him when he realizes Bucky tastes the same.

“Buck,” Steve says softly, nipping at his lip and then dropping little kisses along his jaw. He feels rather than sees Bucky smile beneath his kisses and he pauses for a moment, pressing his forehead against Bucky’s.

“What?” Bucky asks.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Steve says. “You gotta tell me if anything is off limits, okay?”

Bucky’s brow creases a little as he considers his answer. “Just, um, maybe don’t touch my ass, okay?” he says in a small voice. He’s not looking at Steve when he speaks.

The specificity of Bucky’s request brings back a nauseating recollection of the torture list Steve read the night before he arrived, but Steve just drops a kiss on Bucky’s nose and nods. “Okay. Anything else comes up, you tell me, okay? You say stop, I stop. No questions asked.”

Bucky reaches up and places his palm along Steve’s cheek. “I trust you, Stevie,” he says.

_That’s what scares me_, Steve doesn’t say. But Bucky wants this; he pulls Steve down for another kiss, and this one is deep and filthy and needy and makes Steve’s cock begin to swell unmistakably against Bucky’s hip.

Steve pushes up the hem of Bucky’s t-shirt as they kiss, exploring the ridges of muscle and bone of his torso, the varying textures of his scars—some smooth and leathery, others rough and raised—the erect nubs of his nipples and the soft little divot between his collarbones.

“Can I take your shirt off?” Steve asks and Bucky nods. Steve straddles his hips and Bucky lifts his arm away so Steve can work the t-shirt off and then Steve takes his own off as well.

Bucky looks up at Steve through his eyelashes and rests his hand on Steve’s thigh, his thumb tracing circles against the flannel pajama pants. Steve leans forward on his elbows, hovering over Bucky’s chest, not wanting to crowd him, and begins to kiss him again. Bucky runs his hand along Steve’s side, and then up his back, tracing his spine with his fingernails, and when he reaches Steve’s shoulder he flattens his hand and guides Steve down until their chests touch.

Steve eases his weight on to him, relaxing his arms a little at a time, knowing as he does that Bucky can feel how hard he is now, how much he wants him. Bucky’s getting hard, too—Steve can feel him pressing against his thigh—and it makes Steve nervous and glad all at once.

Steve kisses his way over to Bucky’s ear, taking the lobe between his teeth, nibbling and flicking his tongue along the edge, and he can feel a fine sweat break out on Bucky’s chest as he does. His heart leaps because that trick still works, because this changed body is still his.

He rocks back up on his elbows and kisses his way down Bucky’s neck, rubbing his nose against the rough stubble of his midnight beard and sucking gently on the smooth curve where his neck meets his shoulder. It’s his left shoulder, and he can feel the scar tissue from the excised prosthesis at the corner of his mouth, and he touches the skin lightly with his fingers.

“This okay?” he asks softly.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. He tilts his head a little to watch Steve as he kisses his way along his left collarbone, through the field of seared flesh toward the end of his arm. He presses a long kiss to the shoulder as a swell of unexpected grief washes through him. It’s not about the arm—or not just about the arm—but somehow the arm is what embodies everything that’s ever been stolen from him, everything that’s ever hurt him since the day he fell from the train, and Steve wonders how he’s ever going to be able to accept it.

“Come back, Steve,” Bucky says softly, guiding his head away from his shoulder and pressing a nibbling kiss to Steve’s ear. “I’m right here.”

Two months or 23 years ago Bucky’s hand slipped just out of Steve’s reach and he fell into hell and now he is here, in Steve’s bed, warm and breathing and hard against Steve’s thigh. Steve cradles Bucky’s face in his hands and kisses him deeply, then kisses his way down Bucky’s throat to his sternum and this time he goes to Bucky’s right, taking his nipple into his mouth and worrying it lightly between his teeth.

Bucky inhales sharply and then lets out a ragged sigh.

“That good, Buck?” Steve asks, and Bucky lets out a low hum of assent.

Steve stays there for a while, enjoying the sound of Bucky’s breath beginning to stumble and catch. Bucky’s playing with Steve’s ear and his hair, dragging his fingers along his scalp, sending unexpected shivers of pleasure through him in turn.

Steve trails his fingers down Bucky’s chest and stomach, gently circling the rim of Bucky’s navel with a fingertip before lightly—ever so lightly—letting his hand drift down further, beneath the elastic waist of Bucky’s pajama pants, toward the thatch of hair below. He keeps his mouth on Bucky’s nipple and his eyes on Bucky’s face as he does, prepared to freeze at the first hint of discomfort.

Bucky’s eyes are open, and he’s looking down at Steve, his mouth slightly open in an expression that’s almost but not quite a smile. He gasps a little and his eyes drift toward the ceiling when Steve’s hand brushes the tip of his cock.

“Is this okay?” Steve asks, resting his fingertips along the shaft. “Can I touch you?”

“Yes,” Bucky gasps, licking his lips and rolling his hips a little, and then when Steve closes his hand around his cock, he sighs, “Fuck, that’s nice.”

Steve’s brain snags on the _fuck_, decides not to pursue it yet. He strokes Bucky’s cock gently, reacquainting himself with his size and shape, with all the little ways he can use his fingers to make Bucky jump or sigh or grab a fistful of his hair.

“Pants,” Bucky murmurs after a while, and Steve obliges, rolling off to shuck his own while Bucky works his way out of his. Steve doesn’t offer to help—he’s learned to wait until he’s asked and he understands with a pang, as Bucky arches his hips and reaches back to drag the waistband down over his bottom, why Bucky doesn’t ask now—so he just sits by Bucky’s side, idly playing with himself and carding the fingers of his other hand through Bucky’s hair.

Finally Bucky kicks his clothes away and gives Steve an expectant look.

Steve lets his eyes drift over Bucky’s body. The moonlight is gentle on him; it seems to caress and cushion him almost protectively. Bucky is playing with his cock as he locks eyes with Steve, and the effect is unbearably erotic.

Steve could watch him do that forever, but after a few moments he straddles him again, kissing him as he does. His own cock is pressing heavily against Bucky’s hip; he shifts his weight a little and takes both in his hand and begins to stroke them together. Bucky’s eyes had gone wide with delight back in Italy, the first time they realized Steve’s hand was now big enough to do this; now they’re heavy and contented and watching him through long, dark lashes that make Steve melt.

Bucky’s cock is hot and hard against his; Steve’s heart is hammering in his ears and he swears he can feel Bucky’s heart pounding too. Bucky’s breathing—his hoarse, almost vocal gasping—is one of Steve’s favorite sounds in the world, and hearing it again now—_I watched you die_—feels like a miracle beyond reason. His hand is touching every part of Steve it can reach, sliding up and down his arm, his thigh, his chest. Bucky pinches one of his nipples, lets his hand drift up to Steve’s face and runs his thumb across his lips, smiles when Steve sucks on it.

“I want to fuck you,” Bucky breathes, and Steve leans forward to plant a sloppy, needy kiss on his mouth.

“Okay,” he says, reaching for the nightstand drawer.

Bucky watches Steve’s face as Steve slicks him up, tracing his lips and jaw and ear, and Steve loves it when he gets to this point—this moment of serene joy as they prepare to make love, as though the work is a holy sacrament of union.

Bucky would’ve laughed at him if he called it that before, but maybe this time it really is, Steve thinks, as he runs a fingerful of leftover slick into his own ass to ease the way. It’s been a long time since they’ve done this—since before D-Day, at least—and now he’s not even sure when their last time was. Maybe Bucky’s birthday, or maybe there was a time after that. Maybe he should count himself lucky that even in the chaos of war, there were enough times to lose track.

It doesn’t matter. They’re together now. Steve leans forward and kisses Bucky deeply, and then reaches back and guides Bucky’s cock inside him. He feels Bucky bend his knees and dig his heels into the mattress for leverage as he pushes himself in deeper. Tentatively, at first, until they find their fit, but once they do, muscle memory seems to take hold and in unspoken unison they slowly begin to move.

They’ve been making love like this almost since their love began, and Steve didn’t think he could have a single tear left in him anymore, but the beautiful, comforting intimacy of it makes Steve’s eyes water all the same.

Bucky’s eyes are glittering too, but he smiles and closes his hand around Steve’s forearm. “Don’t cry,” he says breathlessly. “Just be here with me now.”

Steve takes Bucky’s hand in his and leans forward to kiss his fingertips, and as he does Bucky reaches the spot inside him that sends a delicious shot of blinding delight up his spine and through his limbs and he gasps.

Bucky grins and laces his fingers through Steve’s and grips him so tightly his fingers turn white. But it doesn’t matter—their rhythm becomes quicker, stronger, and their breath is coming hard and fast and pleasure is rolling through them like honey, thick and sweet and luxurious, and Steve’s eyes are locked on Bucky’s the whole time, and they died once but then they came back and now they’re here, together, in this bed, in this house, in this year they don’t recognize, but it doesn’t matter because all they need to recognize, all they will ever need to recognize, is each other.

The year and the house and the bed and the memory of death all fall away. There is only this moment of connection, of Bucky’s body uniting with his, of the knowledge that they will never lose each other again, that not even the end of the world can keep them apart, that they will always find each other again, always.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! 
> 
> Per the bang rules, I have to post my final chapter on my official posting day, Nov. 12, so hug the people you love, then come back on *Tuesday* for an epilogue that reveals where Bucky and Steve go from here—plus one very-long-overdue confrontation with someone from Bucky and Steve's past. 
> 
> AND! One more incredible drawing from Krycekasks!


	10. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue: With Christmas presents in their coat pockets, they continued south and east, past Union Square and the Bowery and Little Italy and Chinatown before hooking a left and making their way through the Lower East Side toward the Brooklyn Bridge. They walked across and pretended that it was the cold that was making their eyes water, but when they stepped off the bridge and onto Brooklyn soil, they just looked at each other and laughed in disbelief. Somehow, impossibly, they were home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated with new art by Krycekasks!

**Camp Lehigh, New Jersey**  
** December 18, 1968**  
** (Bucky)**

“Nervous? You didn’t sleep much last night,” Steve asks, touching Bucky’s left shoulder. The arm’s not active yet, which means Bucky can’t feel Steve’s touch, but he can tell from the way his hand lingers that he’s still getting used to the hardness of it, to the way it fills out his sleeve. Or maybe he’s just getting used to the irony that it was designed by Stark Industries’ director of advanced prosthetics—Peggy’s husband.

Bucky wonders what Daniel would think if—when—he found out who he’d built it for.

He’s been dragging the thing around in a sling since before Thanksgiving, Steve holding it up in the shower, sleeping in a bizarre nest of precisely placed pillows to keep his arm still. Waiting for the bones to bond with the alloy, for his body to accept the arm as his own.

Bucky’s hated every minute of it—managing the dead arm makes him feel far more helpless than managing without one at all, constantly reminding him of the first time he'd undergone this procedure—but Steve’s patiently endured all his griping and anxious snapping and frustrated whining about it without complaint. Bucky will never, ever, ever understand how he could be worthy of Steve’s love, but he’s finally, finally ready to accept it. Most days it feels like the only good thing he’s ever going to have. 

Yesterday’s X-ray had showed that the bonding was complete. Today, it was time to see what Daniel and Howard’s tech could do.

“Just ready to get on with it,” Bucky says, running his thumb beneath the strap of his sling to relieve the pressure. It was mostly true.

They were quietly legally resurrected the day after the election, President Johnson’s parting gift to the American people—even if they didn’t know it yet. Their existence would remain classified until the 25th anniversary of D-Day next June, but their social security numbers were reactivated, their back pay filling their secret bank accounts with more zeroes than they ever could have dreamed possible.

The only remaining loose end is Bucky’s sister, who still doesn’t know he’s alive yet—and won’t until just before his existence is revealed to the world. He aches to see her again, hates keeping a secret like this from her for so long, but not as much as he hates the idea of making _her_ keep a secret like this from her own family instead. It’s too much to ask of a woman who was a child the last time she saw him, even if he is her big brother.

They’ve been staying in a small guesthouse at Camp Lehigh since Bucky’s surgery, living under the names Stan Roberts and Jack Buckman, and when they’re not in meetings, they’ve been taking the time to slowly, finally reacclimate Steve to the outside world. The base is in a rural part of the state near the New York border, but there’s a decent-sized town with a state college and a couple of steel mills to keep it running about five miles away, and some days Steve will requisition a car and they’ll drive in for a little while, wander the shops, take in a matinee, get lunch at the diners and an afternoon beer or two at one of the bars near campus. With a glove on Bucky’s left hand and long sleeves expected in winter, no one gives them a second look.

Especially not since Bucky cut his hair. He’d asked Ana to do it shortly before they left Howard’s cabin for New Jersey; surprised Steve when he came back from a training run. Steve hadn’t liked it at first—he’d grown fond of running his fingers through it at night to help him fall asleep—but he understood that it was a part of letting a bad piece of his past go. HYDRA had never bothered to cut his hair, and Bucky had gotten so out of the habit of wanting things for himself that he’d never bothered to do it himself, even when he had the chance.

He was tired of looking in the mirror and seeing HYDRA’s slave.

Now he could be mistaken for a man like any other. He wasn’t—he knew no haircut in the world could carry such power—but at least now he felt like he had a fighting chance of rejoining a world he never expected to see again. It was a beginning, not an end. Steve scrubbed the short bristle at the back of his neck, then pressed a kiss to it. _Yes_, he proclaimed. _This would do_.

They haven’t been totally idle while they’ve been for Bucky’s bones to knit: When he’s not introducing Steve to the future, Bucky has been spending his days debriefing SHIELD on everything he can tell them about HYDRA and the KGB.

For Steve’s part, he’s slowly begun to reintegrate with the intelligence community, attending briefings and getting up to speed on current and past operations. Steve had accepted Peggy’s invitation to join SHIELD back in November at Bucky’s urging—Bucky could see how restless he was getting, how much he was itching to get back to doing what he knew how to do best, and wanted to make sure Steve know it was okay to go back into the field without him.

So Steve told Peggy yes, under one condition: That Bucky remain free to make his own choice. 

To Bucky's surprise, she agreed. 

Since then, she hasn't asked for his decision and he hasn't offered one. But yesterday, a wrong turn in Howard’s lab, a glimpse of unexpected evil, had stolen his breath and made him realize that he'd made his decision the day he killed that pilot and that Peggy had recognized that from the very beginning, even if he had not. He could never rest as long as HYDRA still existed—he understood this now—and he knew the only way he’d ever be able to make any kind of peace with the lives he took was the only way he knew how: By avenging them.

And he knows now exactly where to start.

He just has to figure out how to tell Steve.

*****************************

Two days ago, Steve ditched the car at the train station and they rode into the city for the first time since the war. They weren’t supposed to leave town, but Bucky was also pretty sure at least two SHIELD agents were following them, and he was pretty sure that if they wanted to stop Steve and Bucky, they’d have made more noise.

The train dumped them out at Penn Station, and from there they walked. Times Square was seedier than they remembered it, somehow brighter and dingier at the same time, but it was still deeply familiar in a way that neither one of them could adequately articulate.

They walked south through Midtown, past the department stores decked out for Christmas, blending in with the bustle and rush of busy New Yorkers trying to finish up their shopping before the holiday next week. It was cold and slushy and their shoes were quickly soaked, but they hardly cared. They went into Macy’s and bought Peggy a small ruby brooch and Chester a plaid cashmere scarf and Howard, though he needed nothing in this world, a sterling silver money clip they had engraved with the words:_ No amount of money ever bought a second of time_.

They would know.

With presents in their coat pockets, they continued south and east, past Union Square and the Bowery and Little Italy and Chinatown before hooking a left and making their way through the Lower East Side toward the Brooklyn Bridge. They walked across and pretended that it was just the cold that was making their eyes water, but when they stepped off the bridge and onto Brooklyn soil, they just looked at each other and laughed in disbelief. Somehow, impossibly, they were _home_.

Like Times Square, like everywhere, the old neighborhood had both changed utterly and not at all. They didn’t dare spend much time there—they couldn’t risk being recognized—but they wandered around a few blocks, past their school and Steve’s old apartment building and the stationery store where Steve had worked as a cashier after school to help his ma with the rent. Old Mr. Clark was still there behind the counter, staring absently out the window, so Steve tucked his scarf up higher around his chin and they hurried on.

They stopped when they reached the block of Pineapple Street that Bucky had grown up on. The old brownstone was there, and Bucky knew from the dossier that SHIELD had given him that his sister still lived on the first floor with her husband and two children. 

And there, industriously building a rather sad little snowman out of dirty, icy snow on the curb, were two dark-haired kids—an 8-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy. And Bucky didn’t mean to stop—he really didn’t—but the little boy happened to look up at him just as they passed and his eyes—Rebecca’s blue eyes—lit up in his face and stole his breath.

“Hey mister,” he said. “What happened to your arm?”

“Buck,” Steve warned under his breath, grabbing his elbow, but Bucky ignored him and turned to the kids.

“I fell down,” he said, fighting to keep his voice steady. “It’ll be better soon.”

“Oh,” the kid said brightly. “My name is Jimmy. It’s short for James. What’s yours?”

“Jimmy,” his sister scolded, and with her temper up, she reminded Bucky so much of Rebecca it made him almost dizzy. “We don’t talk to strangers.”

“My name is James, too,” Bucky said hoarsely, holding out his hand. The little boy took it cautiously and Bucky closed his hand around the icy, sopping wet mitten and shook it firmly. “Now we’re not strangers.”

The girl looked at him with a skeptical eye, not entirely convinced that this was how strangers were supposed to become not-strangers. But perhaps she figured the man with the broken arm was harmless enough and the big blond man he was with seemed nice enough, because then she volunteered that her name was Linda and that it wasn’t short for anything.

“Are you Rebecca Proctor’s kids?” Bucky asked, and it was stupid, so stupid, because he knew this already, because all the kids had to do was call to their mother that her friends were here and the gig would be up, but he had to know for sure.

Linda nodded. “She went to the store. She’ll be back soon if you want to wait for her.”

“That’s okay,” Steve said quickly, curling his fingers into the sleeve of Bucky's coat. “We’re just passing by. We’ll come back another time.”

“Okay,” Linda said. “Merry Christmas!”

Bucky swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

Steve was tugging on his sleeve hard, and this time he let him pull him away. They made their way to the subway station, but stopped briefly in an alley so Bucky could pull himself together before facing another crowd.

“You think she doesn’t have a photograph of you on her mantel or something?” Steve asked angrily. “You think they might not notice the resemblance?”

“Don’t,” Bucky pleaded. “I know it was dumb. Just—don’t.”

Steve quickly grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “I can’t imagine how hard this must be for you,” Steve said, softening a little, and Bucky remembered that Steve had no living family left. “It won’t be much longer now.”

Bucky nodded. Very early on the morning of June 5, a pair of men in dark suits flashing badges will come to Rebecca’s house, wake everyone up, scare the hell out of them, and suddenly the ridiculous story the children told her about seeing Uncle Bucky’s ghost at Christmas, the one that made her wonder if it was Bucky’s way of telling her everything was going to be okay, will make sense.

The men in suits will bring her and her family to Howard’s Manhattan mansion to meet him, and then after a long breakfast full of disbelieving tears, fly everyone to Washington for the big D-Day anniversary parade the next day. The Howlies will meet them in Washington, having no idea who will be waiting there for them at the hotel, and then Bucky and Steve will finally be restored to the world.

But not yet.

*****************************

Howard’s lab is in a secret basement below a secret warren of offices buried below a false ammunition bunker built too close to the enlisted barracks to actually contain live ordnance. Bucky finds himself rubbing his dead left hand restlessly as the elevator descends, plucking the fingers, trying to remember what it felt like to feel with them.

He’ll be able to, Howard’s told him, much better than he could before. The old arm could sense its position and blunt pressure, which made it good in a brawl and dexterous enough as long as he could see what his fingers were doing, but this one will let him play the piano blindfolded if he wanted to.

Bucky sits on the exam table in a private room in Howard’s lab and carefully removes the sling and his shirt as Steve hovers anxiously behind him. Howard examines the seam where his skin meets the metal, then with careful fingers probes the surrounding flesh, checking for any tender spots. There aren’t any.

“All right,” Howard says with a wide grin as he looks up at Bucky. “Ready to take her for a spin?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, his voice catching in his throat. Christ, he’s ready to get his arm back.

Howard gets Steve to hold Bucky’s arm out while he unscrews a panel underneath. “This could be painful,” he warns. “Don’t move.”

He carefully slots a computer chip into the housing and, peering through a jeweler’s loupe, uses a tiny pair of tweezers and an even tinier soldering iron to connect a single threadlike wire to the chip. When he does, an electric jolt shoots through Bucky’s arm from his fingers to his spine and it takes every ounce of strength not to jump.

“Jesus,” he breathes.

“Hurt?”

“Just strange.”

“Can you feel my hand?” Steve asks, tapping his fingers on Bucky’s palm.

He senses something, but it takes a moment for him to figure out how to translate the impulse into touch. But once he does—he grins and closes his fingers around Steve’s hand, feeling rather than hearing the tiny servos inside his joints whir as moves.

“Gotcha,” he says, and Steve’s eyes are watering. Bucky’s are too—because he really _can_ feel Steve. He can feel the smoothness of his skin and the strength of the muscles beneath the skin and the hardness of the bone beneath that. He can feel Steve’s fingers trembling in his. He can even, distantly, feel Steve’s warmth.

“Holy shit,” Steve says, reading the look on Bucky’s face immediately. “It really worked.”

Bucky lets go of Steve’s hand and begins to move his arm around experimentally, rolling his shoulder and rotating his elbow and his wrist and wiggling his fingers. He pulls his shirt back on—it takes a couple of tries, but he manages to get his left arm into his sleeve without using his right hand to help guide the fabric up—and practices buttoning it with both hands. He’s clumsy at first, but it’s all coming back easily—all the connections are still there, still alive and waking up fast.

He gets off the bed and walks to the instrument table, where he picks up tools at random, manipulating them, testing their weight, experimenting with the fine motor control of his hand. He takes a sharpened pencil, closes his eyes, and flips it up into the air and catches it. He laughs with delight—Howard wasn’t exaggerating when he said the new arm would be more sensitive. He twirls it in his fingers and then, with a wink at Howard, whips it at the bulletin board where it sticks perfectly in the cork like a dart.

“See, you’ll be tickling the ivories again in no time,” Howard says expansively. 

“SHIELD didn’t give me this arm so I could learn how to play the piano, Howard,” Bucky says, and for the first time in five months, he crosses his arms.

“Bucky, this arm comes from me, not the government,” Howard says quickly, and he’s a pretty good liar, but Bucky knows if he were telling the truth, they’d be having this conversation at Stark Industries, not SHIELD. “What you choose to do with it is entirely up to you.”

“But you knew what I’d choose in the end, right?” Bucky says. “Peggy did. That’s why she authorized the contract for the arm. She always knew I’d find out one way or another.”

“Find out what?” Steve asks. “Bucky, you don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do,” Bucky says. “Remember that conversation we had back at the lake, when you told me you wanted me to figure out how to live with what I’d done? This is how. This is my choice.”

Steve looks at him questioningly and shakes his head. “But why? What changed your mind?”

Bucky stares at Howard for a hard minute, summoning up the rage and horror he’d felt the day before, when he spotted—briefly—a face that had haunted his nightmares for the past 25 years, one that he’d never expected to see outside a prison cell ever again. “Do you want to tell him who you've got working for you, or should I?”

“Now look, Buck, you should know more than anyone else what a threat the Soviets were to us. We had to make use of every resource we had at the time, and sometimes that meant making compromises we didn’t like,” Howard said, and Bucky can tell he’s rehearsed this, that this is a line that he’s probably had to use at a Senate subcommittee hearing a time or two before, and he’s not buying it.

Instead, Bucky turns to Steve and opens the door. “Follow me.”

“Barnes—” Howard says, stepping toward him with his arm out, then rightly thinking better of it.

“Don’t worry,” Bucky says grimly over his shoulder. “I’m not going to kill him.”

“Nobody’s killing anyone,” Steve says forcefully. “What the hell is going on?”

“Better if I show you,” Bucky says.

Bucky takes him down the cinderblock corridor to a pair of swinging metal doors and leads him through to a vast bank of supercomputers, whirring and clicking incessantly. The heat pouring off the machines hits them like a blast furnace, but Bucky just keeps going deeper and deeper into the bowels of the lab.

Eventually Bucky catches a distant hum that isn’t electronic but human—the sound of a man singing tunelessly under his breath as he works. Bucky feels a cruel smile tug at his lips in anticipation as he leads Steve around the corner and brings him face to face with Arnim Zola.

“Jesus Christ!” Steve barks. “What the hell are _you_ doing here?”

“Captain Rogers. You look—unexpectedly healthy,” he says with a forced coolness that Bucky knows he doesn’t feel. Then he turns to Bucky. “I was wondering if I’d ever get to see you again, Sergeant Barnes.”

“Oh, I’ve been looking forward to it,” Bucky says calmly, taking two uncompromising steps toward Zola. “You’re looking old, Doctor.”

“Time comes for us all, I’m afraid,” Zola says nervously, casting a look back over his shoulder in search of an exit Bucky knows isn’t there.

“More quickly for you than for me,” Bucky says.

“You should be in prison for what you’ve done,” Steve says, his voice low with rage.

“I am of far more value to the United States in this laboratory than I would be rotting in a hole in the ground, Captain Rogers,” Zola says nervously. “I’ve found Americans can be quite willing to make a deal when it profits them to do so.”

Bucky snorts and continues to move toward Zola. Not aggressively, not quickly—just slowly, steadily, backing him up toward the wall as he speaks.

Zola’s begun to sweat and lick his lips nervously, his eyes flick toward Steve for help, but Bucky can tell from Steve’s short, steady breaths behind him that he’s in no mood to oblige.

“Itching for your shield?” Bucky asks softly behind his shoulder.

“Little bit,” Steve says.

“He's mine,” Bucky says.

Steve places his hand softly between Bucky’s shoulder blades, the way Bucky used to do with him whenever they were fighting hand-to-hand in close quarters during the war. “I know.”

“You will not kill me,” Zola says, with an attempt at confidence that fools no one.

“Oh?” Bucky says mildly, then smiles when Zola takes one last step back and barks his heel against the wall. A thousand emotions cross his paunchy, weaselly little face all at once, but at the beginning and end it’s just pure, naked fear.

Bucky holds up his left hand, tests the fingers one more time, then reaches forward and pins Zola to the wall by the neck.

“Bucky—” Steve says, sounding worried for the first time.

Bucky knows he’s thinking of Vera McDonald, but he can’t let that distract him. Instead, he squeezes, feeling Zola’s flesh pillow beneath his fingers, feeling his windpipe strain against the pressure of his grip. He’s not squeezing tight enough to strangle him or cut off the blood supply to his brain, but he’s close enough to make Zola panic. Zola begins to struggle against Bucky’s hand, beating uselessly at his arm and swinging uselessly at Bucky’s face. But Bucky’s much taller; Zola’s arms can’t reach him and it renders his distress almost comical.

“Buck,” Steve says more sharply.

“You’re afraid,” Bucky says calmly. “You’re afraid I’ll give you what you deserve.”

He feels Zola swallow against his hand and then gratifies Bucky with a single small nod. “I know what you want,” he says hoarsely. “I can help you.”

Without releasing Zola’s throat, Bucky reaches forward with his right hand and plucks away his small gold tie tack. It’s very subtle—you wouldn’t notice the design unless you were looking for it, and Bucky was—but embossed ever so faintly on the surface is a skull with six tentacles curling out of it. “Yes, you can,” he says, turning the HYDRA insignia over in his fingers. Then he squeezes tighter and pushes harder, and doesn’t stop even when a wet, pungent stain spreads across the front of Zola’s trousers and down his leg. “You’re going to tell us everything you know.” 

*****************************

They spend Christmas alone at the guesthouse. Because they technically still don’t exist, neither Peggy nor Howard are allowed to bring them to celebrate with their families, and Phillips (being Phillips) doesn’t even ask. But honestly, they prefer it this way. Once the world learns they’re alive, it’ll be years before the novelty wears off enough for them to have any semblance of privacy again. This may be the last Christmas they get to spend in peace for a good long while.

Zola has been singing like a canary about HYDRA’s infiltration of U.S. intelligence services ever since the SHIELD guards picked him up, so badly had Bucky scared him, and a multi-agency task force is already hard at work coordinating a massive, secret housecleaning on Christmas morning. Steve is cranky about being forced to sit this mission out, but it can’t be helped: One whisper that Captain America and Bucky—especially Bucky—are back would blow the secrecy of the entire operation. For once, they’ll do more good on the sidelines than in the battle.

So they decide to make the best of it.

Bucky makes roast beef with potatoes and carrots the way Ana taught him and Steve builds a fire and even though it’s a clear, bright night, they keep the blinds closed and the curtains drawn so they can be totally themselves tonight. They’re both sipping an excellent scotch that Howard gave them while they wait for the food to cook, and although neither one of them can even manage to get a buzz from it, the sweet bite on their tongues is enough to trigger the memory of spreading warmth and easy laughter. 

Steve puts on a Billie Holiday record and hums along as he goes back to the small second bedroom that’s been artfully masquerading as Bucky’s should any unexpected visitors pop by. After a minute of shuffling around, he returns with his sketchbook.

“I didn’t want to wait till morning to show you this,” he says, handing it over and sitting cross-legged on the floor to watch Bucky’s face. “Third to last page.”

Bucky opens the sketchbook and thumbs through the pages with his left hand, still marveling at the dexterity and sensitivity of his new arm. It’s not quite as good as his right, but already he’s having moments where he forgets he wasn’t born with it, and he knows that’s a good sign.

He can tell that Steve’s still getting used to the arm, is still maybe a little troubled by it and what its presence reminds him of, but he’s trying. In the evenings when they watch TV, he’ll take Bucky’s left hand and thread his fingers through it, rubbing his palm with his thumb. It’s good for them both, Bucky thinks—to help Steve accept the arm and to help Bucky be less nervous about Steve touching it. In these moments, more than most, Bucky becomes aware—sometimes painfully, sometimes less so—of how his two lives have come together, and everything he had to go through to get there.

He knows he’s getting close to the page Steve wants him to see when Steve blushes furiously in anticipation.

“Steven,” Bucky says with mock gravity. “Have you made a naughty picture?”

“Nothing naughty about it,” Steve says, leaning back on his arms and flashing him a shit-eating grin. “Just wanted to finally finish my life drawing assignment.”

Steve had gotten around the problem of making Bucky pose without knowing he was being drawn by simply capturing him while he was asleep. Bucky was sprawled on his back, his right arm tucked beneath his head and his left arm slung across his stomach, completely naked save for a tangle of sheets around one ankle.

His lower half was in shadow, but Steve had left nothing to the imagination; every part of him was rendered in precise, almost photographic detail. It doesn’t feel obscene, seeing his cock lying soft against his thigh like that—it just makes him feel whole in a way that he hadn’t in a long, long time. And that extends to his scars, too—Bucky likes that Steve accorded them the same degree of care, that he had not tried to fix him, that he had not tried to erase the record of his past inscribed across his body.

More compelling, though, was his upper half, illuminated in a square of moonlight from the window by the bed. He’d taken exquisite care to capture the individual reflection of each scale-like plate in the light; the particular way that the brushed steel surface seemed to glow rather than shine. Despite the fact that it’s 15 pounds of metal and wire, the drape of his arm and the relaxed curve of his hand feel completely natural, completely at ease.

His face, too, looks utterly at peace. He can’t remember the last time he saw himself so serene—probably before the war—and it feels like a miracle to realize he could still be capable of it now.

Bucky feels something unexpected release inside him—a fear he had not realized that he had been carrying around since he left the RAFT, that Steve would never stop trying to get the old Bucky back, that he would never stop trying to fight the Winter Soldier for Bucky’s soul, when the truth was that Bucky would always carry some part of the Winter Soldier inside him, that a little bit of his darkness would always leach out.

In the drawing, Bucky is at peace, but it’s really Steve’s peace that Bucky sees—his decision to accept Bucky’s past, to live with the horror of it, to embrace the man it will haunt for the rest of his life, to stick with him till the end of the line, through hell if he has to.

The record needle slides with a crackle across the vinyl into a familiar song. Bucky stands up and holds out his left hand—because he can finally do that again, hold out his left hand for Steve to take, with the shy, self-effacing smile he made whenever Bucky asked him to dance, and clasp his hand around Steve’s and hold it to his chest as he slides his right arm around the small of his back.

The fire crackles and Lady Day sings, and Steve nuzzles Bucky’s nose and then presses his cheek to Bucky’s cheek and they shuffle around the living room like they’ve been doing this all their lives. Bucky can feel Steve unconsciously running his thumb along the side of Bucky’s left hand like he used to do back in Brooklyn, and he doesn’t say anything about it, just smiles and pulls Steve closer, dropping little sideways kisses against his temple, and keeps dancing until the song fades away and the record needle begins to scrape lightly against the label.

But it doesn’t matter if the song’s over or the album’s over, because they have time now. They have a tomorrow. The end of the line is nowhere in sight.

_The very thought of you, and I forget to do_  
_The little ordinary things that everyone ought to do_  
_I'm living in a kind of daydream,_  
_I'm happy as a king,_  
_And foolish though it may seem,_  
_To me that's everything…_  
_The mere idea of you, the longing here for you,_  
_You'll never know how slow the moments go till I'm near to you_  
_I see your face in every flower,_  
_Your eyes in stars above,_  
_It's just the thought of you,  
_ _The very thought of you, my love…_

**-FIN-**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading! All of your kudos and comments mean so much to me. As a latecomer to this fandom I really appreciate that so many people are still willing to check out new writers! You guys are the bomb and I adore you all. <3 
> 
> Much love to Krycekasks, who has been a joy to collaborate with. Thank you!

**Author's Note:**

> Comments give me life!
> 
> I also do the thing on [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea).


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